


should've loved a thunderbird instead;

by DearHart



Category: Kingsman (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Brief Eggsy Unwin/OMC, Fix-It, Fix-It of Sorts, Implied Past James | Lancelot/Percival, M/M, Pre-Eggsy Unwin/Tilde, TGC Compliant, being posted in three increments but the entirety of the story is 3/4ths finished, but also not?, but exists in a tgc compliant world, diverges from canon before the start of tgc, no actual Eggsy/Tilde, part one is fluff with an angsty ending so don't get comfy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-14
Updated: 2018-03-12
Packaged: 2019-03-18 09:10:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 45,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13678653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DearHart/pseuds/DearHart
Summary: It’s all so easy, and if life has taught Harry anything, it’s that nothing is evereasy. If it is, he can be fucking sure that the universe is waiting with a big, damned boot to smash him into nothing more than offal on the pavement.On the warm, Kentucky pavement...Things go a bit different after Harry hit the ground in front of the South Glade Mission Church.





	1. part i. stars fading

**Author's Note:**

> This is basically an opus to us and has taken fucking forever to finally post. I feel like I should say something interesting here but um...I got nothing lol.
> 
> Happy Valentine's Day!

****_Harry...Harry, wake up..._

Eggsy’s voice is soft in his ear, tugging gently at his consciousness as Harry drifts through the waters of sleep. He struggles against its pull, pushes back in opposition to the current. Eggsy chuckles and smooths away the creases that have begun to form between Harry’s brows with his thumb.

“Always look so cross when I have to wake you,” he tells him with a smile in his voice. Harry grunts unintelligibly in response. The morning sun is too bright, and the bed is warm, and the waves keep tugging him away from the shore. He lets himself float away for just one moment more. Just a moment… _fight it_...

“Har-ry!” Eggsy whines, shaking him by the shoulder. A mixture of playful and stern. His skin smells of lavender and sleep. “You’re gonna get me in trouble, luv. I promised I’d keep you out of here like the good sentry I am, and now look at me.”

Harry doesn’t even have to slit an eye to know that Eggsy is referring to his current state of undress, collarbone mottled purple and flush red and the flaking remnants of come on his belly.

It’s disgusting, really. Harry feels rather proud of that fact.

Still refusing to budge, he pulls Eggsy into a half-asleep embrace so he can feel the warmth of him against his skin. He lets out a satisfied sigh, but his eyes remain shut in protest of the daylight.

“You know we won’t hear the end of it if she catches us like this,” Eggsy coaxes but his tone betrays his threats. Harry can hear the smile in his words, and it makes his own widen fractionally as his hands wander along the familiar body pressed against him.

He can see it all without having to expose his eyes to the morning sun. The curve of Eggsy’s back. His broad shoulders shaped to define the muscles that he has worked so hard to tone. How could Harry possibly want to get up when all he needs is right there, naked and warm?

“Five more minutes,” he grumbles. Barely.

“You’re not gonna be late to our own wedding.” Eggsy’s voice has taken a more stern approach, but that lightness remains. Like trying to be severe with a pup, really.

A shot of excitement shoots through Harry’s heart all at once, pulse fluttery and stomach light. He hums. “Say that last bit again.”

“We’re getting _married_ today,” Eggsy coos as presses himself closer against Harry’s body. “And you gotta get up or face Plannerzilla’s wrath.”

“I’m not the one who hired her, I’ll have you remember,” Harry tells him, clutching tighter still and tilting his chin enough for Eggsy to burrow beneath. His warm breath skims over Harry’s skin as he murmurs his reply.

“Wanted us to have the best is all.”

Harry finally deigns to open his eyes at this admission. The room is not quite so bright as he might have imagined it what with the drapes drawn and the lights low. The morning light peeks through the thick fabric over the windows, and dust floats lazily in the sliver of sun that slices into the room like a long blade through the place where the curtains—just barely—do not meet.

“Even for such a small affair?” he asks quietly. He pulls back from his hold on Eggsy enough to peer down at his lover’s sleep soft face. The hair on the left side of Eggsy’s head is pressed to his temple, and blood sits high in his cheeks.

“I’m marrying the love of my life, ain’t I? It don’t matter how big the wedding is. Want it to be perfect.”

Even after all this time, Harry’s heart nearly seizes in his chest at such an easy admittance. He tilts his head to capture Eggsy’s lips with his own, a warm and pliant kiss that promises more if only one of them would open their mouth and allow it to further. Instead, Eggsy wrinkles his nose and pulls back.  

“Wish I’d known she was so fucking traditional though.”

Harry sighs and presses a kiss to Eggsy’s forehead instead. “I thought you called it ‘romantic’.”

“That was before you gave me that filthy goodbye kiss,” Eggsy tells him—a reference to the evening before—with a lecherous grin and suggestive eyebrow waggle. Harry ignores him.

“At least she’s not quite so traditional as to refuse to take part in a wedding between two men. Particularly when one is old enough to be the other’s father.”

Eggsy pouts. “Traditional enough to ban us from each other’s rooms though, innit?”

“Not that it worked,” Harry replies easily and hopes his own pride at that fact doesn’t seep into his voice.  

“Which leads back to us getting bollocked if she catches you here,” Eggsy says, detaching himself from Harry with reluctant force until he’s sitting up on their obscenely large bed. “Get up before she finds us, you lazy bugger.”

The cold, empty space that Eggsy leaves behind in his wake is more of an incentive than his teasing words.

Slowly but surely, Harry manages to find the clothes he’d kicked off rather unceremoniously the night before while Eggsy wraps his arms around his knees with that same sleepy smile. Harry wants to stay. He wants to kiss that grin, crawl back into Eggsy’s arms, and bury himself in them. Instead he buckles his belt, shoes in hand as he gives his darling a departing kiss.

“See you at the altar?” Harry murmurs, pressing his forehead against Eggsy’s own and taking a moment to caress his cheek as he watches those green eyes shine. Or were they blue? The colour is strangely elusive, but he’s lost in them all the same.

“You better not be late,” Eggsy orders.

Harry’s lingering smile freezes once he opens the door.

Jeanie Gold, one of London’s top wedding planners, stands just beyond the threshold with her hands on her hips. Not many people can make Harry feel like a teenager again. Jeanie’s glare can.

And then some.

“I thought I’d find you here when there was no answer from your room. Which, I remind you, is where you _agreed_ to stay last night.”

God, it’s like being back in sixth form. An odd notion considering he and Jeanie are, in all actuality, equals in age.

She has her hair down today. Her tight, black curls are nearly to the length of her shoulders and spread voluminously outward. The style must be for the wedding, because any other time if her expression was this stern her hair would be pulled into a taut updo to match.

On the floor by her feet is a medium sized bag—the contents of which Harry knows would rival Mary Poppins in extensiveness—and she’s wearing a dusky pink, chiffon shirt that compliments her pale, brown skin tucked into a white pencil skirt. Nude pumps clack impatiently on the tile.  

“Ah,” Harry begins. He looks over his arm, hand poised on the edge of the door as he holds it open and cardigan slung over his elbow haphazardly. Eggsy is still sitting on the bed with his knees still drawn up. Instead of his previous smile, he’s wincing quite severely. “I had just come by this morning to—”

“For god’s sake, don’t _lie_ ,” Jeanie cuts in with a roll of her dark eyes. She reaches up, short and menacing little creature that she is, and grasps Harry’s chin with her thumb and forefinger. Her nails are trimmed short and lacquered an immaculate shade of black. She tilts his head from one side to the other in examination. “Puffy eyes, as expected. I had thought romanticism might sway you from climbing in through the window like some damned Romeo.”

Harry opens his mouth to contradict that he did, in fact, use the front door, but Jeanie cuts him off knowingly to add, “Metaphorically speaking, of course. And what’s this?”

She taps the side of his neck with two fingers, not to hurt but just sharp enough to make him flinch in surprise. Harry hasn’t seen it but he can guess that Jeanie must be referring to a newly donned love bite. He glances back accusingly at Eggsy who is pointedly not looking his way.

Jeanie pushes past him and into the darkened hotel room, immediately drawing squawks of protest from a very naked Eggsy Unwin.

“Oh, calm down. I’ve seen worse, and you’re not my type besides. I won’t look if it makes you more comfortable.”

Now that the attention has been diverted, Harry slowly closes the door behind him. He mouths a paltry ‘good luck’ when he catches the eye of his poor betrothed. Eggsy, in reply, would have glared had Jeanie not opened the heavy curtains with the dramatic flair of a woman who's ready to give the day a what for.

“Fucking hell, Mrs. G!” Harry hears Eggsy cry as he shuts the door with a soft click.

Harry _does not_ skip down the corridor, but it’s very a near thing. His heart seems to be doing that for him anyway. Instead, he shoves his hands deep into the pockets of his slacks and does his utmost to contain the smile threatening to burst forth lest he present himself as a complete madman to any other passing guests.

The keycard to his door beeps in recognition as he enters his rebelliously unused room.

Marriage. He’s getting _married_ today.

It was not so long ago that he would have never believed living to see his name in the paper. Not to announce his wedding, anyway.

Harry leans into the door, letting it click shut under his weight as the passing thoughts settle. Part of him still debates if he truly deserves this, if he deserves Eggsy. It’s hard to let go of something he’s believed for as long as he can remember. That’s latched into the heart of him. That every aspect of his lifestyle—from Kingsman to his sexual preference—would leave him alone and unloved.

Harry lets out a deep sigh as if expunging those destructive ideas. They are old and settled into his bones.

 _No_ , he decides before throwing his clothes in a heap on the bed and stepping into the bathroom. He runs the water until steam to clings to the tiles and fogs the mirror. _Eggsy loves me, and I believe him._

The shower is hot enough to turn his skin pink, rinsing away the messy remains from the night before. Harry lets the spray wash over him. The soap from the hotel smells of lavender like Eggsy’s skin and the scent of it is thick in the steam of the shower. He has to stop believing himself to be only as good as his codename. His happiness has warmth and comfort. He doesn’t need to feel guilty about that any longer.

 _And I love him_ , he thinks with his heart fluttering like the gentle beat of butterfly wings.

.

_He wonders at that feeling. If it was a warning. A sign. Maybe his gut was talking to him in the way that James always used to tout on about. Harry can’t decide if listening would have done him any good._

.

Harry is getting married in a barn, a sentence that was not exactly on the list of things that he had ever expected to say.

Though to be fair, he is technically getting married _outside_ of a barn. This is a distinction that Harry has heard several times in the course of planning the event.

There is a large weeping willow in front of the—did he mention ‘barn-like’—structure that overhangs in just the right manner to allow their private cluster of people to be hidden away within the alcove that the dangling branchlets create. Fairy lights are strung inside to look like stars and vases of ranunculus and baby’s breath hang on ribbon from the tree’s branches. Ropes of multicoloured flowers drape from the curtain of greenery to give even more of a secluded appearance.

A handful of artfully mismatched chairs sit in a curve around where the grooms are to say their vows, though no traditional ‘isle’ cuts through the centre of them. There is no flower girl, no groomsmen. It’s too small an event for it.

The dinner party afterward, however, will be held—Harry regrets to inform— _in a barn_.

He will admit to the set up being rather lovely after all is said and done, though. Jeanie is not one of the best for nothing after all.

She is also excellent at concealing hickeys, reducing puffiness around the eyes, and stuffing Harry into his navy suit in damn near record time. Harry would be impressed if he wasn’t quite so frazzled by the process.

He tugs at his skinny, black tie nervously, all of his previous soppiness wrung out like a dishcloth as the current time and that of the wedding grow nearer and nearer to one another.

Has he forgotten something? Oh yes, of course. His _senses_.

…or perhaps just his lapel pin.

The ceremony is a simple affair with little pomp and a lot less circumstance as though the two men getting married are eager to start the celebration. Harry, for one, hasn’t even taken in much of the scenery around him by the time he steps through the swaying willow branches. The fairy lights dancing in the breeze make the tree glow with a lifelike warmth.

And in that moment, he sees Eggsy surrounded by light and ribbons and coming towards him with a smile so radiant it makes the rest of the world look dim around him. Harry loses focus on everything and everyone else but the man with whom he wants to spend the rest of his days.

He couldn’t care less about the words coming out of the man officiating the ceremony. He doesn’t hear the little sobs from Eggsy’s mother. Even Merlin has all but disappeared from Harry’s vision. All he sees are those lovely eyes. They’re so terribly blue today.

When they finally kiss, it’s as filthy as Harry can get away with in front of the small crowd of onlookers. Soft and warm as ever, he can even feel the smile curling up on his new husband’s lips. It wells Harry with a joy that he cannot possibly describe as he has never felt anything quite like it before.

Married and happy, Harry is eager to drink, celebrate, and dance with Eggsy. His husband. A word, he realises, he will not soon tire of using.

“Say it again,” Eggsy whispers as they share their first dance among a sea of faces, his fingers playing with the hairs at the back of Harry’s neck.

“I love dancing with my _husband_ ,” Harry tells him with a quiet fondness meant for Eggsy’s ears only.

Eggsy, apparently, will not soon grow tired of hearing it either.

“And what’s this then?” Harry asks, gently tugging at the corner of Eggsy’s bowtie as they continue to sway. It’s the only bit of his suit—navy blue with no waistcoat and a little silver rose pin on the lapel instead of a button hole—that doesn’t match Harry’s.

Harry had expected the bowtie. The floral print, however, is new.

“Dunno,” Eggsy shrugs as Harry returns his hand to his husband’s— _husband’s_ —hip. “Liked the look of the flowers, I guess. You don’t like it?”

“I adore it,” Harry tells him. He’s being entirely truthful, but if his words alleviate the unsure look on Eggsy’s face and replace it with a smile so sweet it could make Harry’s stomach ache then—well. He won’t be complaining any time soon.

He leans forward to press his cheek against Eggsy’s temple until they are so close that Eggsy’s arms cross behind Harry’s neck and grasp at the fabric of his suit jacket. The music is sweet and slow and echoes through the barn’s cavernous rafters. Harry holds Eggsy flush against him, losing himself in the warmth of another’s body and the sway of the simple dance step as it rocks him like waves on the ocean. He feels as though he could fall into a hazy half sleep or perhaps soak Eggsy into himself until no one would be able to part them ever again.

Neither happens, of course. As with all good things, this one must come to an end.

One song fades into another, and Roxy smoothly cuts between them. Harry lingers only a moment, watching as Eggsy sweeps her away and peacocks a path across the open dance floor.

“Lovely view, isn’t it?” Merlin asks, sidling up to Harry once he’s moved to the outskirts of the floor. Roxy throws her head back in laughter at something that Eggsy says  to her with a mischievous grin.

“Breathtaking,” Harry replies as he takes the flute of champagne that Merlin proffers. Lets the sweet drink sparkle across the tongue and settle pleasantly in his belly. He knows he’s being terribly soppy, but if anyone is going to put up with him, it’ll be Merlin. God knows he’s a professional at it by this point. He gives Harry a fond smile before reaching inside his jacket—the soft velvet shimmering a lovely shade of garnet—and pulling out two cigars.

“Shall we continue the celebration outside?” Merlin suggests, holding out one of the rolls. Both are quite large and preserved well for the perfect moment.

Which, Harry realises, is now.

“Cuban?” He cocks an eyebrow after setting down his glass in order to take the offering. He can smell the familiar aroma of pepper and chocolate on the rough paper almost instantly.

Merlin gives a sly smile. “Special occasion.”

The contrast between the life within the barn and the still, quiet of the darkness outside is striking, but Harry welcomes the breeze while they rest against the old wooden wall. The stars above are the only things watching as the two men spark up their treat. The small fire from the match lights up Harry’s face as he brings the tip of the cigar to ember life with a hand cupped around the flame in protection from the wind. The taste of citrus is as smooth as the smoke that lingers around Harry’s throat before he releases it into the darkness with a heartfelt exhale.

Merlin breaks the comfortable silence after his first taste of the smoky toast. “I can’t recall the last time I’ve seen you this happy.”

“I almost feel I don’t deserve it,” Harry confesses before taking a pull once more. This time he lets it linger in his mouth and tumble out heavily, tasting the swirls of rich wood dancing across his tongue before it too disappears into nothingness.

He doesn’t know why he said it. Impulse, he supposes.

“You’ve been through enough, Harry. Give yourself a break.”

Even in the faint moonlight, Harry can see Merlin’s face becoming tight. He may give Harry a lot of shit, but Merlin is one of the closest friends that Harry has had in a very long time. It touches him to see his brother-in-arms defend his happiness.

“I said _almost_.” This makes Merlin chuckle and take another breath of his cigar. “I do, in fact, feel incredibly lucky.”

Merlin says nothing to this, but then again the two men have never had to exchange many words in their conversations. Instead they revel in the silence, the muffled music behind them and the rich tendrils of smoke floating heavy in the air. It brings a sense of peace, a luxury neither men have had many chances to enjoy.

Eggsy’s voice breaks Harry’s train of thought.

“There you are!” Eggsy is looking at him with the smile of someone gone breathless after dancing one too many songs. His cheeks are flushed, and his hair has lost the perfect coif that Jeanie had worked so hard to tame. Harry wishes to never forget these details.

“Merlin, can I please have my other half back?” Eggsy requests, benevolently.

That fond grin graces Merlin’s lips once more. “Go on, lover boy. Enjoy your time off before I get you working again.”

He barely finishes his sentence before Eggsy grabs Harry’s hand and pulls him back inside the barn. The warmth hits Harry like a wave, and the music once again wells in his ears. He’s going to enjoy every minute.

.

_In retrospect, he would rather that he hadn’t._

.

The honeymoon is for a week in Maratea, and they spend most of their time lazing about in the sun or engaging in shameless competitions to show off for one another by exploring areas that are clearly labeled as ‘off limits’. Or, of course, having slow and pliant sex on nearly every private surface of the villa, as well as a few not-so-private ones. They see the Cristo Redentore and Grotta delle Meraviglie and knowingly visit tourist traps with nigh a complaint about the obviously inflated prices.

It’s warm. Relaxed. Eggsy looks beautiful and tastes of sea salt near constantly.

When they return to London, his hair appears a little bleached and the crest of his cheeks are all pink. His posture has gone loose with that yielding aura specific to vacationers coming home after a long holiday in the sun. Harry kisses him where the bridge of his nose is ruddy before they get out of the taxi in front of their home.

And just like that, they’re back into the fray.

Merlin calls with mission research a few hours after he learns they’ve arrived, and Michelle stops by to return a wriggling and overexcited JB, and the few bills Kingsman doesn’t pay have to be done today. It’s almost as though Italy was just the long inhale between one stroke and the next in the middle of a swimmer’s fifty meter.

All in all, life is not entirely different after having married Eggsy, but there is some power in a name. ‘Partner’ always felt too stiff and formal, ‘lover’ sounded to Eggsy like he was a fainting maiden in Regency literature, and ‘boyfriend’ made Harry feel like a nervous sixteen year old pretending to be a ‘very nice lad’ in front of his paramour’s parents before having a fumbling fuck in the backseat of his car.

(Eggsy called this description ‘weirdly specific’ but accepted it nonetheless.)

‘Fiance’ actually had a rather nice ring to it, Harry admits, but _‘husband’..._ ‘husband’ is a far superior fit. It’s so comfortable that sometimes Harry almost forgets to be enamoured by the newness of it, almost forgets that the man he’s sleeping next to hasn’t always been just what he is now.

He picks up Eggsy’s slack hand from where it has been resting on Harry’s abdomen and kisses the back of it at the thought—sleepy and dreamlike as it is—before extracting himself from their bed. It’s one of the few times that he has woken first, jolted from sleep instead of lazily dragging himself from beneath the heavy weight of it.

It isn’t until he’s settled himself at the table with coffee, breakfast, and the morning paper that Eggsy drowsily stumbles down the steps.

“Morning, luv.” Eggsy’s words are still thick with sleep as they roll off his tongue. After dragging his feet down the length of the long dining table, he plants a kiss on Harry’s forehead. Harry wonders if small gestures like these are always going to be part of their new life. He certainly hopes so.

“Good morning, darling,” he replies with a fond whisper, taking in the sight of his still incredibly groggy husband.

(…husband. Still feels exciting to think.)

It didn’t take long after they first became involved for Harry to discover that Eggsy was one for sleeping in as little clothing as possible. Of course, the fact that they often found themselves naked in bed is entirely beside the point. Rarely does Eggsy put on more than a pair of boxers when he wakes up the next day, regardless of whatever might have transpired the night before. This time, much to Harry’s disappointment, he’s sporting a pair of sky blue pajama bottoms.

The pastel shade does make a beautiful contrast against Eggsy’s still tan skin, though. Harry’s eyes follow the fine dusting of hair—still bleached from the sun—from Eggsy’s belly button down toward his pelvis.

“Harry, it’s too early for leering.” Eggsy is always quick to notice him watching, although he has yet to complain about it with any sincerity. When he does catch Harry, as now, it’s always with an amused smirk that seems more playful than frustrated.

“It’s not often I get to enjoy my breakfast with a view.” A blatant lie.

Harry takes a sip of his coffee while Eggsy sits down with a fresh mug of his own and a couple slices of toast. The smell, as it often does, catches Harry’s attention with a gluttonous interest as he looks to see the thick layer of strawberry jam that Eggsy spreads generously.

“Want some?” Eggsy offers a bit later, when the first piece of toast has been devoured and his cup drained. He lifts the last slice to Harry’s face before the man can object. Eggsy, he realises, has grown used to his scavenger traits. Really though, it’s Eggsy’s fault for making everything look so tempting.

He takes a greedy bite, the crunch of the toast almost as satisfying as the sweet, tangy taste of high quality jam. He’s too busy relishing it to notice Eggsy wiping his thumb across the corner of Harry’s mouth.

“Seconds?” Eggsy lets the digit linger until Harry sucks it clean.

“Always,” he growls, never breaking eye contact. Eggsy understand the the double entendre  full well and gets up from the table with their empty dishes, a sure sign that he’s having none of it.

“We’re not gonna be late to our first day back on the job ‘cause you’ve got an insatiable appetite.”

“Merlin’s heard worse excuses,” but Eggsy only responds with a sideways glance before heading upstairs to get ready.

What remains is such a different sight from the lavish breakfast spread Harry had put out for Eggsy what feels like a lifetime ago. The exuberant silverware and crockery replaced with horrifically cheesy mugs that they’d bought each other as a joke during their honeymoon. The huge selection of cooked food swapped now with leftover crumbs on the expensive tablecloth. Harry prefers this version any day.

A moment passes, and Eggsy’s footsteps have only just faded away before Harry hears them jogging back down the steps again, this time quicker than before and with absolutely no possible way Eggsy could have finished his morning routine before turning around the way he came.

“Harry!” he says rather urgently.

Harry looks up with wide eyes, a little surge of worry in his gut, “Eggsy? Is something the matter?”

Eggsy stands at the bottom of the steps with a sort of frazzled look, his hair not yet tamed. His mouth is open in a sweet little moue that Harry might dwell on were he not so concerned about the frantic look on his face.

“Harry. That was the first time we had breakfast at our table.”

Harry’s alarm quickly turns over to confusion. His eyes return to a normal size, if not a little squinted as his brow furrows.

“My dear, that was far from our first breakfast here, I’m afraid.”

“What are you on about, luv?” Eggsy continues impatiently. “I mean our first breakfast at the table _as a married couple_.”

Harry looks down at the furniture in question as though he has never seen it before now and says casually, “I suppose you’re right.”

He settles his mug—‘Keep Calm and Love Eggsy’, commissioned under Eggsy’s gleeful gaze—beside his plate. Rising from his chair, he stalks around the table toward his spouse.

“Course I’m right!” Eggsy exclaims with playful assurance and the indignation of someone who is not being taken quite as seriously as they ought. “I’m always right!”

“Is that how this marriage is going to be then?” Harry asks as he approaches, watching as Eggsy’s head is forced to tilt backward slightly in order to maintain eye contact the closer Harry becomes. “You always being right and I, the oblivious husband, doomed to stumble along behind.”

He’s near enough to Eggsy now to see the flecks of unidentifiable colour in his irises and the way his skin has begun to peel where his face had been burnt.

Eggsy smirks, flirtation evident, “Ain’t that always the way it’s been? You do seem to enjoy being behind me.”

Harry hums thoughtfully, “I would like to point out that you only had a couple slices of toast and hardly any of your tea. Technically, you’ve barely eaten breakfast at all.”

It’s an old and well-worn argument between them, with Harry believing breakfast to be the most important meal of the day and Eggsy having hardly any stomach for it.

“Maybe I wanted to give you a little time to cool off,” Eggsy counters, which is a bold-faced lie, but since they both know it—and know that the other _knows_ they know it—Harry decides not to call him on the fiction.

“Do I seem cooler now, then?” he asks instead, gently tracing the backs of his fingers down the side of Eggsy’s neck and leaning closer still.

“We can’t be late Harry,” Eggsy whispers, breath ghosting over Harry’s lips.

He assures, “We won’t be,” and permits his mouth to just graze over Eggsy’s as he forms the words.

Slowly, _slowly_ , he moves the close the gap, wanting to feel Eggsy’s tongue slide against his own. Maybe he’ll have him over the table or against the wall behind them or lain across the stairs barely a few meters away until there are bruises on Eggsy’s back in the exact spacing of the steps. Or perhaps—

But instead Eggsy retreats backward with a grin and tugs on the sleeve of Harry’s robe.

“C’mon,” he says, backing toward the staircase, “you can give me a blowie in the shower.”

“ _Lord_ you are a spoiled child, aren’t you?”

Eggsy calls out, already halfway up the steps, “If I am, that’s on you!”   

Despite his most recent words, or perhaps in proof of them, Harry follows up to the second floor and through the master bedroom into their bathroom without any real protest.

“This way,” Eggsy begins later as they’re kissing each other naked in front of the shower, “we’ll save on water _and_ time. No way we can be late then.”

Harry sets out to prove him wrong on both on accounts.

Thank god for the size of his hot water tank.

.

_He doesn’t know why he chose Maratea. He hates that fucking place. A child died in his arms there once, sandy blonde hair matted with blood and deep brown eyes wide in terror. She had called him ‘Papi’ with shaking voice; he hadn’t corrected her. Maratea is a damned, lonely place._

.

Time stands still for no man. _Regardless_ of marital status.

Harry and Eggsy are quick to discover this fact. As much as Harry wishes he could work by his husband’s side, the world has very different plans and finding the time to even share dinner becomes a difficulty for them. Sometimes, they’ll catch each other during breakfast before their duties call to them. If they’re lucky, they’ll even have the chance to walk to work together, but that inevitably usually leads to not being back in time to see each other before one of them falls asleep. Or worse doesn’t come home at all. Saving the world doesn’t work on an itinerary.

Their erratic and lonely schedule continues for what feels like a lifetime, but their morning routine is something so sacred, it feels stolen.

“Fancy dinner at Gaucho’s tonight?” Harry asks as he helps his husband knot his tie. It doesn’t take a genius to read Eggsy’s face and know that—once again—Harry will be dining alone.

“I’ve got that undercover job in Moscow, luv,” and he sounds as disappointed as Harry feels. “Won’t be back until the end of the week at least.”

Harry lets out a small sigh as he straightens Eggsy’s shirt collar.

“We could try next week?” Eggsy attempts, voice heartbreakingly hopeful.

“I have meetings with the people over in Washington.” Harry turns to avoid Eggsy seeing the way his face begins to harden with the gut wrenching anger over something for which neither of them are to blame.

They barely see―let alone _speak―_ to each other the following week. At some points, time feels hazy around Harry. As though it’s difficult to keep track of the moments that fall between one meeting with Eggsy and the next.

Eggsy does manage to tidy up things in Moscow, but by the time he gets home Harry is already fast asleep. He wakes to Eggsy wrapped around him, and his heart feels heavy at the thought that he didn’t even notice his husband crawl into bed behind him. Eggsy’s lying there, still in his shirt and bespoke trousers. The sight is almost too endearing to leave behind, but with a peck on Eggsy’s relaxed forehead Harry pulls himself away. Time never stands still. Especially for someone who is notoriously late.

“I was hoping I’d catch you before you went jetsetting,” Eggsy says over the comms later, obviously trying hard to hide how upset he is. It doesn’t escape Harry.

The feeling of letting down his other half, the love of his life _,_ sits heavy in his chest. “I didn’t want to wake you…”

“I hate that I only get to see you when you’re not physically conscious,” Eggsy mutters morosely.

“I’d say I hate that you finish missions ahead of schedule only to be disappointed, but I’m rather proud of your work in Moscow.”

“I did it so I could come home to you…”

Their conversation ends on a bitter note.

Harry almost resents the Americans for keeping him away from home. He’s in a foul temper throughout handshakes and the proverbial passing of the olive branch. He wants to go home. He wants to see Eggsy for fuck’s sake. He feels selfish with it. He has a duty to Queen and Country, after all, but sometimes Queen and Country seems to ask too much of them.

Harry finally returns late enough for the streets to have quieted down but early enough to hopefully catch Eggsy before he falls asleep. He’s so impatient to reach his home that he barely mumbles a goodnight to the loyal Kingsman cabbie as he slides out. He feels guilty for a moment before he swings the door open to his— _their_ home.

“Eggsy?” he calls out into the darkened hallway, and for just a moment everything feels a touch distant like he’s gone dizzy before the smell of food overtakes his senses.

The smell of curry from their favourite, little Indian takeaway place is on the air, but when he turns to peer into the dining room the gutted remnants of the restaurant’s containers aren’t littering the table in Eggsy’s usual style.

Instead, three wine glasses have been arranged—upside-down—in a little cluster between where Harry and Eggsy might have been sitting. The head of a rose is cupped inside the bowls of them, and a tea candle rests on top of each foot.

They must have been lit at least three hours ago, because all have long since burnt themselves out.

Harry and Eggsy’s place settings are arranged in their usual corner just as they have been since the first morning that the two of them ate breakfast together at this very table. The food is plated rather extravagantly, as if Eggsy wanted it to _look_ lovely but didn’t quite have the time to cook it himself. And though there isn’t a salad plate, Harry can’t help but notice what there is: a water goblet, two wine glasses (one for white and the other for pudding wine), a bread setting in the corner, the proper silverware on the left, right, and above the plate...

Eggsy must have wanted to show off.

Harry is suddenly sick with guilt, feels it rolling around in his gut and climbing up his throat. He misses Eggsy. _So_ much. Sod Kingsman. Sod Queen and Country. He wants _this_.

He finds his husband on the sofa in their sitting room, all curled up on his side like a pill bug. On the television, Netflix has gone idle as though Eggsy drifted off in the middle of a small marathon. His lips have fallen slightly agape as usual, and he’s releasing soft, little sighs with every exhale.

Harry wakes him gently, kneeling beside his head and stroking the hair around his face. Letting him surface slowly.

“Sorry for being so late, darling,” Harry says, much later.

He hugs his ever patient Eggsy from behind in the middle of the kitchen, swaying to a song only they can hear while the smell of reheated food slowly starts to fill the room again.

“Wouldn’t have you any other way, yeah?” Eggsy reassures with a voice still raspy from sleep as he leans back against Harry’s shoulder. A perfect, little nook for Harry to catch the lingering scent of citrus from Eggsy’s shampoo.

The smell makes the world go wide for a moment, like everything is floating outward. An empty balloon suddenly being filled with air. It’s the same near dizziness that overtook him when he’d come through the door earlier. Harry wonders for a moment if he’s coming down with a fever.

Eggsy twists around to press a kiss against the underside of Harry’s jaw, and the feeling fades.

“Let’s save the having until after dinner, shall we?” Harry replies, still a little breathless.

Eggsy chuckles in that particular way that always makes Harry’s heart feel tight. The quiet, soft kind of laughter that Eggsy saves for when he’s close to Harry’s skin so that Harry can feel it on his neck.

Their dinner is perfect in every way. Not because it’s an exquisite meal or served in an expensive restaurant. For Harry, the personal touch of his favourite greasy food lit by now restored candlelight and a fine bottle of wine at Eggsy’s side means more to him than any Michelin starred dish. He relishes every bite with slow deliberation.

“I think...” he pauses weighing the words that hang heavy on his tongue. Now with an empty plate and plenty of time to ponder, Harry breaks the silence with weighted determination. Still hungry enough, though, to lift the final chips from Eggsy’s plate. Eggsy has grown used to Harry’s habit of stealing food from his plate and doesn’t bat an eye as he takes a sip from his own glass of wine. The next words fall from Harry’s tongue like water. “Eggsy, I think I’m ready to retire.”

“Wot?” Harry knows Eggsy heard him. For anyone who knows Harry like Eggsy does, the reaction is understandable. “Kingsman’s your life, luv.”

“It was. For many years, it was. But it’s no longer my priority.” Harry is now on his feet, clearing the saffron stained dishes. “Besides Arthur is running things smooth enough that my transition shouldn’t be an issue.”

“Yeah. Feels like Kingsman stepped up its game when Chester died.”

“A far more old fashioned Kingsman retirement. I don’t want to be that. I don’t want to miss any more dinners.”

Eggsy seems to consider him over the rim of his wine glass. Harry lets his own mind drift to thoughts of a more quiet life. Of days reading on the sofa or that chair by the window in their bedroom with his glasses far, far away. Of greeting Eggsy at the door and always being there to patch those little cuts, to kiss the darkened bruises that always bloom after being shot through the standard, bulletproof suits.

He gives the plates a quick, methodical rinse and sets them in the sink with a soft clank.

“I just want you happy, Harry.”

Harry hadn’t even noticed Eggsy creeping up behind him until his gentle voice was at his shoulder. Which, he supposes, must be a sure sign of trust from a highly trained, super spy thirty years in the making. Harry turns to face him, the small of his back pressed to the edge of the counter, and watches as Eggsy’s hand slides down the length of his arm until their fingers are laced. He can’t help but fixate on the way the candlelight glimmers off of Eggsy’s wedding ring.

“But maybe we could like...table this talk for a bit later, yeah?” Eggsy continues. Perhaps it’s the wine or Eggsy’s already sleepy disposition, but he leans closer with soft, lidded eyes. “I’d like to have my Harry back for now. I ain’t seen him in a minute. Miss him. Wanna watch a shit movie on the sofa until we both pass the fuck out.”

And how could Harry resist such a plea for domesticity? His poor Eggsy doesn’t ask for much. Harry would gladly give him the moon if Eggsy wanted it.

“Your Harry would like that very much,” he complies. Work left behind along with the leftover takeaway, he follows Eggsy back into the sitting room. Keeping the peace would have to wait until morning. For now, all Harry wants is to feel Eggsy’s gentle breathing as he falls asleep next to him, his arm resting over Harry’s chest as he breathes the deep rhythm of one fully at peace with the world. All while watching Julia Roberts float from store to store in the height of her shopping spree.

.

_Something happens then. Something changes in the air. The world was so, so wrong. It was hard to hold on, to keep his grip. Like falling. But then._

_Then it changes._

.

The journey to find the right Galahad is strained at best in the following months. Harry gets first say in who will take his seat at the proverbial round table, a novelty not every Kingsman gets to enjoy, but his task of finding someone to do his title justice isn’t easy when one is so selective.

Right now, though, he doesn’t feel the strain of being picky. Nor fear of the gravity of his decision. Nor an impulse to forego retirement entirely. In fact he’s more confident than he has been in a long time, but that’s less to do with him and more to do with his candidate.

Kavita is older than most of the recruits that Kingsman comes across. An ex-MI5 agent, a natural poliglot, and trained in several levels of combat, coding, and curry. (She is _fiercely_ proud of her curry. Harry admits it earned her brownie points. It was just that damn good.) Currently, she’s hunched over a dirty bomb in the back of a discrete van parked along a crowded street. Eggsy is kneeling close by, guiding Harry’s protegé. Partly as a part of her lesson but mostly so they don’t fucking die. Harry can hear Eggsy’s breathing as Kavita instructs him which wires need to be cut. He sounds nervous. Hell, they both do. But Eggsy has always been good at making himself and others believe what they were doing is as mundane as washing dishes.

“This would make an amazing photobomb.” Eggsy’s terrible joke is met with silence before Harry hears a snort coming from the comms.

“Sorry,” Eggsy huffs. Harry can hear the smile in his voice. He sounds as apologetic as Harry knows he absolutely is. “Puns come with the job, unfortunately.”

“You must be a _blast_ at parties.” Kavita doesn’t miss a beat.

She passes the exercise with flying colours, and Harry’s chest wells up with something that he realises stems far deeper than just pride. Choosing to retire is a major step away from the only life he’s really known. Not only is he getting time to be someone other than Galahad, though, but something better is taking his place. Kingsman is in good hands with people like Kavita. Like Eggsy.  

What an era they will bring.

But not yet. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and Harry’s retirement can’t happen overnight. Not yet anyway. After all, he’s still damn good at what he does and loves the rush of it. The thrill of having death at his heels with Eggsy by his side is still something that he can’t let go of all at once. So he allows himself just a few more missions. He ends up escaping the arsenal of an entire drug ring hidden deep within the Welsh Valley. Eggsy at the wheel and Harry with his glove compartment rifle—a traveling gentleman’s essential—make quick work of the mission. The collateral may be explosive, but the tech department watches in awe as Harry ends his career on a note so high that it makes his heart race.

Furthermore, working alongside Eggsy certainly has its perks. Not least of all, the almost inevitable encounters between them when they are finally alone, high on adrenaline, and oftentimes covered in blood and sweat and the desperation of men who missed death by the turning of the hour. No sane man could blame him for wanting to pin the boy bodily and fuck him rather roughly against whatever surface is available.

“God, you’re beautiful out there,” Harry tells him on one such occasion. “Knew you would be. Knew you were perfect for this.”

He means Kingsman, but of course the double entendre is just as true. Eggsy is perfect like this as well: arse in the air as it swallows Harry’s cock whole and the side of his face pressed into the shitty, nicotine stained mattress. Harry clutches Eggsy’s hips and gives a brutal trio of thrusts. The cool of his cufflinks press into Eggsy’s warm skin. There’s something intoxicating about fucking him completely bare while Harry himself is still mostly dressed.

Eggsy has gone nearly incoherent at this point, mouth barely able to do anything but plead and babble and breathe soft, little ha’s that Harry knows are meant to be the beginnings of his name. Harry has him pinned down too mercilessly for Eggsy to do anything but rut his hips backward in need and reach blindly behind him for Harry’s arm.

Harry uses the opportunity to grasp the inside of Eggsy’s elbow for the added leverage and pull their bodies flush together, rim fluttering around the base Harry’s cock. Eggsy stutters a curse that sounds half punched out of his throat.

“My bright, brilliant boy,” Harry murmurs hotly against the dip of Eggsy’s spine as he softens his hold and his posture. Curls over his lover to taste skin.

They don’t know it at the time, but they won’t have sex like this again. In some shitty place in the middle of god knows where with adrenaline in their blood. It’s not Harry’s final mission, but it is close.

.

 _It’s all so easy, and if life has taught Harry anything, it’s that nothing is ever_ **_easy_ ** _. If it is, he can be fucking sure that the universe is waiting with a big, damned boot to smash him into nothing more than offal on the pavement._

_On the warm, Kentucky pavement..._

.

He knows that Kingsman don’t really retire like the rest of the world does. They’re never going to be fully rid of Harry, nor he them. Not with all the secrets that he knows.

That doesn’t mean that the two can’t settle into a peaceful state of coexistence, however. He’s certainly not the first Kingsman to retire. Not by a longshot. For a spy organization that boasts ‘the most dangerous job interview in the world’ (“Really Merlin? You don’t think you’re laying it on a touch thick?”), their mortality rate is shockingly low. Not low for, say, stocking shelves at Waitrose, but the point still stands.

They do train them to be the absolute best after all.

He knows that they may call on him in the future. Ask him to attend galas or other events to keep up some of his identities. Use him for an in when the situation requires it. Call him when missions have ties to ones that he’s worked before.

He gets to keep his glasses, something that—were it not for his friendship with Merlin and his connection to Eggsy—would likely end up shoved into a drawer somewhere. Something to be checked in the mornings and before bed but otherwise forgotten.

Eggsy doesn’t have to worry about telling Harry too much when he returns from a mission. Kingsman’s eyes are ever on Harry as it is, and there’s a strange sort of comfort to that. He often talks to Merlin while Eggsy is away, hunched over the stove while sorting out some new recipe. Merlin in his ear as he juggles work at his tech-station with one half of his brain and uses the other half  to mock Harry for what he calls ‘a frightening level of domesticity’. Harry doesn’t even consider it an insult.

Having only one active spy between them frees up a surprising amount of time for Eggsy and Harry to just...be. Their new lifestyle—one that actually allows them to _have_ a life—causes the home around them to evolve as well.

It’s the little things at first. Harry notices that he spends his downtime more often in their living room instead of his office upstairs, either watching a movie with Eggsy or napping at midday with a warm body curled against his ribs or simply reading an old favourite with Eggsy’s feet in his lap.

The blu-ray collection grows considerably.

A framed photo of them stands propped with pride alongside other treasured snapshots.

Eggsy’s favourite cap travels across the room depending on how tired Eggsy is upon removing it.

Their kitchen also shows symptoms of domestication. Harry doesn’t remember the last time he used his elegant silverware, and he’s become rather fond of their growing collection corny mugs. Cooking at home has turned into a treasured activity instead of means to an end, no longer a lonely flurry purely to satiate the need for food.

Harry believes that it’s sometime during these developments that he notices Eggsy stealing glances at the spare room, as well. It’s never used for much other than keeping the bits and bobs that just don’t have a place in the rest of the house as well as a large cabinet filled with old paperwork and a few pieces of furniture to give the illusion of being a fully functioning guest room.

“This room has a gorgeous window, don’t it?” Eggsy says one day when Harry finds him there, his shoulder resting against the doorframe and arms crossed in a pensive rest. “Like something out of Peter Pan.”

Eggsy’s smile is almost shy.

“The one Wendy Darling sits on?” Harry is behind Eggsy now and gazing into the same room. Right across from him stands a large bay window, a bubble of glass with a wooden bottom frame that is large enough for sitting. “Yes, it really is quite picturesque,” he agrees, marked by wrapping his arms around Eggsy so that his back is pressed to Harry’s front.

“Just needs a little girl to sit there…”

Harry doesn't know if Eggsy is aware of the weight in his gentle words. They are a soft murmur, an escaped thought. But Harry is... _so_ aware that it’s as if his senses are heightened. His breath almost hitches, but he catches himself before the telling reaction presents itself.

“...or a boy. Or whatever our child wanted to be.”

“ _Our_ child?” Harry queries, posture stiffening and attention narrowing to the profile of Eggsy’s face.

“They would look just like you…” Eggsy doesn’t seem to be listening to Harry, the sound of his voice mellowed by his fantasy. There’s an odd scent on the air. Lightning sharp and earthy like before the rain. Harry wonders if a storm is coming through.

“Eggsy…”

“Life’s so much calmer now, Harry,” Eggsy sighs, his body tensing minutely if he already working himself up for whatever Harry might say. “A peaceful one. We could have a shot at being more than agents. We could be a family.”

Harry doesn’t reply for a long time. Possibly because he doesn’t know what to say. Possibly for the fear of it. The silence stretches on enough for Eggsy to grow impatient.  

“Have you ever thought about it?” He’s still looking into the room as he caresses Harry’s hand with his thumb.

“I…” Harry starts but trails off as quickly as he began. Has he ever thought about it? _Has_ he?

…no.

Not really. Not in his _conscious_ mind certainly. That had never been—it had never been an option. When he was young, homosexuality had barely been legal and was still widely taboo. And that wasn’t even taking into account his parents and...other things. He could scarcely conceive of a world where he could have a happy, _public_ relationship (let alone marriage) with someone he truly loved. Children were just… _so far_ out of his peripheral.

Then there was Kingsman and all the responsibilities that it entailed, and even as the world around him evolved a place for men and women like him, _he_ evolved an existence too full for the lifestyle that it could provide. He pictured himself aging at the proverbial round table because he simply could not picture himself belonging anywhere else.  

Before he knew it, he was fifty years old, and life simply wasn’t at his feet any longer but trailing behind him instead. He didn’t even consider being regretful—or not so, whatever the case may be—about things that had honestly never occurred to him. One does not regret a decision to take or not take an item they never even knew was available to them.

But then came Eggsy. Like a freight train, like a bus, like a 747 falling from the sky and directly onto Harry’s head.

Harry thinks of the wallpaper in the kitchen downstairs, torn out and replaced with a subtle shade of paint. The etchings on the walls are almost entirely gone, save a few landscapes that Eggsy quite liked.

He thinks of the collection of films growing day by day, half of which are favourites of Eggsy’s or ones that they had discovered together.

He thinks of the photographs of him and Eggsy on the mantelpiece and of the winged trainers in the entry hall and of the pillow in their bed that smells perpetually of citrus shampoo.

“I didn’t know you wanted children,” Harry finally gets out. Softly. Reverently.

Eggsy shrugs, the muscles in his back shifting against Harry’s hold. “Neither did I. Just…one day I saw this kid, right? No more than six or seven but she had these mad, brown curls and this barely-there cleft in her chin and I thought: ‘That’s what Harry’s kid would look like.’ And I couldn’t…I couldn’t get it out of my head. It just got bigger. Thinking about what’d be like, us raising a baby. Thinking about how our life seems to be opening up for something to fill it.”

He turns his head so that he’s looking up at Harry with this expression of longing—his eyes gone just a little glassy—that very near breaks Harry’s heart.

“And thinking about this room,” he continues quietly. “Still can’t get the thought out of my head, luv, no matter how hard I try. And I’m not gonna force you, swear down, and I’m not trying to manipulate you or nothing. But it’s not just that I want a baby, neither. I want…I want a baby _with you_.”

And how can Harry deny him. Harry can’t deny Eggsy anything.  

.

_What was he thinking? What was he thinking? What was he—_

.

“You missed a bit!” Eggsy teases, poking Harry with a paint brush just on the tip of his nose.

“Really, darling, we’ll never get the room finished if you keep using that joke,” Harry tells him without frustration. He wipes the pastel green from his nose while Eggsy hops from the small step ladder that he had been using to finish the final coat of paint.

Harry takes a moment to appreciate this Eggsy, not the Eggsy who wears the finest bulletproof bespoke, nor the Eggsy in his casual polo shirts and jackets. No, this Eggsy is a whole new one, and it makes Harry’s heart do that familiar flutter as it always does when he’s reminded of how domestic they’ve become.

Eggsy wears an old, ratty t-shirt, the words ‘SURF NAKED’ emblazoned across the front in white lettering. The shirt itself is a black cotton that’s so worn and soft it might be considered _off_ -black instead. There’s a rip down one side. To go with the tears in his jeans no doubt. Those, too, are overused and worn through but together they create the ideal uniform for DIY work.

He looks something out of a magazine, Harry thinks as his mind wanders toward places not at all wholesome.

But he lets those ideas take a back seat—for now—and follows Eggsy’s gaze to the drying walls as the newspaper on the floor crinkles under their feet. The spare room isn’t going to be spare for much longer. The boxes are gone, and the musty smell of neglected paperwork has all aired out, and the layers of dust had blown away the moment the large windows were opened to greet the spring air.

“I can’t believe it’s actually happening,” Eggsy muses, letting out a heartfelt sigh. His eyes are wide with euphoria and a hint of nervous excitement. “Seems mad. D’you think she’ll like it?”

Eggsy has already asked this.

Five times.

In the past hour.

Harry doesn’t mind though; Eggsy is just voicing what they’re both feeling. At least one of them is. Harry can’t quite put his anxiety into words.

But it’s a good kind. A unique kind. The kind that only expectant parents get, he’s sure. The kind one gets when they’re about to meet someone they’ve been dreaming about for so long.

“Our daughter will love it, Eggsy.”

 _“Our daughter_ ,” Eggsy whispers to himself, sounding awed.

The time is drawing rather frighteningly near. Their surrogate is in her third trimester and Harry has more about Lamaze and prenatal yoga than he honestly ever thought he’d need floating around in his psyche.

Merlin had looked at Harry like he was raving mad when he’d told him the news. Not that Harry really blames him. He is over fifty years old and starting a family. From scratch. With no previous experience, only one grandparent, and no siblings of appropriate babysitting age between them.

He is, Harry will admit, a little bit insane. And petrified. And _incandescently_ happy.  

“Our daughter,” Harry repeats with a sigh. They’re standing shoulder to shoulder without touching, both staring at the wall—still a little slick with wet paint—as though there’s something terribly interesting about it. There is decidedly not.

“Eliza,” Eggsy says, as though it’s a correction. His arms drop to his sides.

“Eliza,” Harry echoes yet again. They’d chosen the name some time ago, taken from the movie ‘My Fair Lady’ which had stolen Harry’s heart so suddenly with the mere utterance of its title in a small fitting room not so long ago. He lets his hands fall to his sides as well and gently, so gently, he grazes Eggsy’s palm with the tips of his fingers.

Eggsy takes the hint to clasp their hands together and leans his weight against his husband’s side.

“You’re gonna be a great dad, Harry.” Eggsy says it like a fact. Like an absolute.

“Do you think so?” Harry asks anyway. In his peripheral, he can see Eggsy turn and peer up at him with those bright hazel eyes.

“God yes. You’re gonna be fucking aces. I know it.”

Harry doesn’t know if he believes him or not, but he hopes all the same. He trusts that _Eggsy_ believes it, and―for the moment―that’s enough.

The following day finds them on a planned trip to IKEA, their shopping list already created online and printed out for convenience sake. Harry would like to say that meant there wasn’t much wandering to be had.

He would _like_ to, but he can’t. Eggsy sees to that.

“These instructions make me feel like I’m bloody three. Where’s the actual writing?”

The spare— _Eliza’s_ room is layered in what remains of the furniture boxes, some folded to save space, others ripped, and all of them gutted. The contents are either assembled or in the process of being so. With difficulty.

Harry Hart was once an international spy, capable of decoding messages without a cypher and hacking safes secured with the most complicated systems in the world and encrypting his computer to the point of being completely uncrackable. No exceptions.

And the Gonatt Crib from IKEA is looking to be what bests him.

He’s still sitting on the floor, lost in his own world of crudely drawn little stick men telling him where to put ‘stick a’ (Harry has a few ideas…) when Eggsy rejoins him. Holding two cups of tea, he sits cross-legged on the patch of cardboard next to his husband.

“Making progress then?” he jokes while handing Harry his own cuppa and resting his head on Harry’s shoulder.

“Eliza’s going to have a cardboard nest,” Harry sighs and takes warm gulp from his Scrabble mug. Eggsy had spotted the cup, along with its mate, during one of their many shopping trips and gleefully snapped it up. Harry’s bears a large H, it’s value marked as four points.

“If I can put these things together, you can too, luv.” Eggsy is doing that thing where he delivers his comforting words softly against Harry’s neck, whispered with a tenderness that both encourages and flushes Harry.

“I hope she has your intelligence then,” Harry says and turns his head eagerly to meet the lips so near him with his own. They’re still overwarm too. He can taste the tea on Eggsy’s mouth when he kisses them.

Eggsy gently bobs his head so that his nose brushes Harry’s. “I hope she has your brown waves.”

“I hope she has your eyes,” Harry retorts, pressing their foreheads together. He closes his lids as Eggsy chuckles, stealing a couple more smacking kisses from Harry even as he does so.

Eggsy says, “I hope she has your smile.”

Harry kisses back against grinning lips now, this time with more intention and hunger. He feels Eggsy’s breath growing heavy against his own.

They don’t get very far with the crib building that afternoon, nor do they finish their tea.

.

_There are no words, but if he closes his eyes, he can almost…_

.

“Harry, luv. Harry, wake up,” Eggsy mutters groggily into his ear, breath fanning over the back of Harry’s neck. “S’your turn.”

And Harry hears it now, Eliza’s choked off cries from down the hall. Her voice is shrill and wet and urgent, and _god_ Harry is so tired. He extracts himself easily from Eggsy’s grasp though, gently peeling his hand up from where it’s resting on Harry’s waist and bending the arm at the elbow to settle it next to Eggsy’s head on the pillow.

He sits up heavily, like there’s a stone sitting on his chest, and doesn’t deny himself the simple pleasure of feeling envy toward his deeply slumbering husband.

He thinks Eggsy’s cheats sometimes. Harry isn’t sure that he can remember the last time it _wasn’t_ his turn.

Eliza’s room is lovely now that it’s fully furnished. The bay window is lined with soft cushions for sitting—and far too many pillows in Harry’s humble opinion—and strung above are fairy lights for a bit of constant lighting.

The baby’s cries soften into whimpers as Harry leans over her crib, gentle and warm hands reaching down for her. Wide, hazel eyes peer up at him with lids lined by fat tears. Her lower lip is still trembling, mouth bent in that odd curve that reminds Harry terribly of an unhappy Eggsy.

“Hello, my love,” Harry greets quietly. His heart feels ready to burst once again at the sight of this tiny wonder, this fragile child all his own. Her small body is light and pliant as he lifts her, one hand on her back and the other cradling her delicate skull. Eliza’s downy, blonde hair is soft against his palm.

“I think your da scams this old man out of sleep sometimes, Eliza,” he tells her in a conspiratorial tone as he brings her up against his chest.

Once he’s collected a bottle of breastmilk from the fridge and warmed it—all with Eliza whimpering and snuffling in his ear—he makes his way back upstairs and settles in the window seat amongst its plethora of pillows. He really ought to use the rocking chair, but he can already feel himself fading. That damn thing always leaves a crick in his poor neck.

Harry watches his little daughter struggle to keep her eyes open as she feeds, her tiny hands clenched into fists.

 _You’re a bit young to start a fight, darling,_ Harry thinks with fondness.

He’s so engrossed with Eliza that it’s not until his eyes begin to sting that he notices the harsh light outside. Damn London traffic. Doesn’t matter what time it is there’s never a quiet moment on the city roads. Harry wonders who could be in such a hurry at this hour.

It reminds him of when Eliza had first arrived. Eggsy and he were barely awake when they had gotten the call and bolted out the door with barely enough time to even button up their shirts.

Or was he wearing a jumper? He can’t remember that moment well. It’s fuzzy. Hazy around the edges. Like...music in another room. But then, he was eager to meet his little girl.

He peers down at his present Eliza, suckling at the plastic nipple of her bottle with eyes drooping and struggling to stay open, and tries his best to ignore the invasive traffic lights that make his tired eyes ache.

“Is she causing you much trouble?”

And there he is. The one person in his life that seemed to appear as if prayed for, making every worry seem trivial. Eggsy leans against the doorframe and his form is wrapped in Harry’s dressing gown. Harry once attempted to buy Eggsy his own, but Eggsy—like a nesting bird, especially now with his sleep fluffed hair—keeps going back to Harry’s, undeterred. Not that Harry is complaining. Eggsy looks better in it anyway.

“Darling, why aren’t you sleeping?” Harry whispers, quiet but dee. Adamant to not wake the dozing babe.

“Solidarity.” Eggsy creeps into the room so silently Harry can barely hear his footsteps. Spy training, it would appear, does wonders for parenthood. “Also, it was technically my turn.” His smile is shy but unapologetic.

“You absolute devil.” Harry presses his forehead against Eggsy’s temple where he is now sitting on the edge of the window seat at Harry’s height. Eggsy gives him a peck on the cheek before looking at their little bundle. His finger strokes the back of her hand with the delicacy of a feather.

With Eliza freshly fed and burped—“You do your old man proud, baby girl,” Eggsy comments—the new parents drag themselves back into the warm comfort of their disturbed bed. Eggsy crawls in first. He outstretches his arms for Harry, who wraps himself around the heat of Eggsy and lets him nuzzle into his neck.

Harry rests his chin on top of Eggsy’s head, finally allowing his eyes to close. A thought passes through his mind, but in his exhaustion he doesn’t hold onto it for long.

The light.

There aren’t any roads outside of Eliza’s window.

.

_Sometimes, he dreams of white walls. A nightmare. A memory. The pale borders closing in, seemingly by increments. He had woken from them with gasping breaths and heart pounding like a drum. He remembers Eggsy reaching out to hold him in his sleep, and he always smelled of lavender._

.

“Shhh, darling,” Harry hushes as Eggsy lets out a particularly loud cry. Eggsy groans unhappily, hips stuttering a bit as he rides Harry’s lap and head tumbling backward. His neck is sweat slick and gleams brilliantly when it’s exposed to the room’s low light. Harry is mesmerised by the sight of it. Wants to taste the salt on his tongue.    

“Know I’m bad at that, Harry,” Eggsy tells him desperately. “Can’t be quiet when you’re—fuck you’re— _shit_.”

Harry pulls himself up to sitting, changing the angle of how he’s seated within Eggsy in a rather favourable manner if the little punched out gasp he receives is anything to go by. Harry wraps an arm about Eggsy’s waist to direct the pace of his writhing and pushes up into the tight heat of him in several pointed thrusts. Eggsy’s poor neglected cock tags Harry’s belly with pre-come with every rut.

“I love that about you. Love how you can’t keep that fucking _sinful_ mouth of yours shut when I’m fucking into you.”

“ _God_ I miss you so much,” Eggsy pants, sighing when Harry’s mouth finds the notch of his collarbone. He grips the matted, brown waves at the back of Harry’s head between his fingers and _holds_. “Fuck.”

Harry whispers, “I’m right here,” against sex-warm skin, his breath ghosting over his lover’s neck. Eggsy shivers as Harry wraps a hand around his neglected cock.

“Feel so far away sometimes, Harr—ah, _ah_.” His hips are beginning to stutter frantically and offbeat in a rather revealing way, and Harry knows he’s getting close. They both are.

“I’m here,” he repeats nonsensically. “I’m right here.”

They haven’t done this in awhile. Haven’t had the time, really. So many nights are spent with one of them—and even on occasion both—stumbling unwittingly into sleep as they attempt to lull Eliza to lay down or falling to bed exhausted after a long day of running this way and that to satiate their daughter’s wailing.

Harry loves Eliza— _god_ , does he love her—but he loves Eggsy too.

He feels as though his husband is going to float away some days or that he’s just an apparition, the ghost of Eggsy fluttering around the house.

A cardboard cutout standing in for the part while the actual thing is far, far from Harry’s reach.

Here, Eggsy feels real and solid. The weight of him bouncing in Harry’s lap. His body curling and tensing as he comes across Harry’s fist. His forehead creased and mouth open in pleasure.

Harry rolls Eggsy onto his back and fucks into him half a dozen times before following Eggsy into bliss.

When he finally floats back to reality, Eggsy’s breath is still coming out in quick puffs as he rubs soft circles across the broad expanse of Harry’s back. Harry draws out of his hold slightly—lifting the weight of himself up onto his elbows—to look down at that lovely, grinning mouth.

“Hello there,” Eggsy greets quietly as his eyes dance across Harry’s face.

Harry chuckles under his breath and replies, “Hello, darling.”  

He steals one more sweaty, panting kiss before dropping down next to Eggsy. He’s barely stretched across the bed—after a perfunctory clean up by means of the nearby box of tissues—when Eggsy curls himself around him.

“Think I like having a Sex Date,” Eggsy announces, because they are prone to _actually_ fucking each other a bit silly for at least a few moments. Particularly after a short dry spell such as the one they just put to rest.

“There isn’t as much beating about the bush, is there?” Harry agrees. He pulls Eggsy even closer until the warmth of his skin is comfortably pressed against Harry’s side. He does miss the reckless abandon of their early sex life sometimes. There’s a certain charm, though, to allowing themselves a planned evening for nothing but a mind blowing fuck.

“Save that for round two, luv.” Eggsy’s smirking, and Harry knows it. He would’ve thought him far too shagged out to be wanting more. Nothing Harry won’t sort out later though, he thinks.

Not long into their post coital lull—with Eggsy firmly wrapped around him and Harry’s hand caressing that broad back—they hear the voices.

“ _Watch what you’re fucking doing!_ ” a female whispers with a spitting hiss. Harry shoots up from Eggsy’s embrace so fast his brain takes a moment to catch up.

 _Down the hall_ , he thinks. It’s like flipping a switch.

And there’s that feeling again. Like the world is going wide and open and clear but hazy all at once. Dizzy. Sharper this time. More than he ever recalls feeling before this moment.

“ _Everything’s under control._ ” A second voice. Male. Same location as the female. They don’t appear to be moving but sound dangerously close. Harry is up with his pants secured around his waist in an economic number of movements.

“Get to Eliza’s room,” he orders. Eggsy doesn’t need to be told twice. He’s cocking his gun before Harry has a chance to grab his own.

Harry sidles down the hall as he’s trained to do, clearing the corners as he rounds them.

“ _That’s double the amount!_ ” the male voice is objecting now, barely trying to keep his voice a whisper. It isn’t until Harry is at the bend of the stairs that the female voice replies. He can’t help but notice the laughter in her voice.

“ _You’d be grateful if you knew why I’m doing it. Trust me._ ”

Her voice was so cold. Harry hated it. Hated her for breaking into his home. Intruding into the world he’d so carefully crafted. Harry will make damn sure the only way they’re leaving his living room is through a body bag.

“ _But it could be lethal!_ ”

“ _So could—_ ”

Harry passes through the open door with his gun held high, aim taking only a fraction of a second to lock onto the voices.

Even if that’s all they were.

“Fucking television,” Harry sighs and lets out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. His adrenaline is pumping so furiously that he can feel it in his ears. It takes him a few solid minutes to calm down, and by that time Eggsy has approached him from behind.

“Oh, fucking seriously?” Eggsy is much more visually—and gruffly—relieved. He edges inside the living room and immediately goes for the remote.

Harry finds himself watching the screen instead. A woman in glasses and dark blonde hair is busy doing something slightly off camera. It’s a bit much what with the white lab coat and everything. What show is this anyway? He doesn’t recognise the actress at all…

The scientists soon disappear into the sudden blackness of a deactivated television.

“That was exciting,” Eggsy huffs out and puts down the remote as he shuffles towards Harry. He grasps Harry’s hand, leading him down the hall and up the stairs with a few gentle tugs.  “Can’t get the spy out of you, eh?”

Eggsy’s gentle tease gets a chuckle out of them both as the wave of adrenaline stutters out.

Harry can barely remember the rest of the walk to the bedroom, but they find their way nonetheless. The bed sheets are strewn haphazardly across their nest, and their discarded clothes are still littering the floor.

“How about we go away for a weekend?” Eggsy stops in the middle of the room and turns to face Harry. “Its Valentine’s Day soon, innit?”

He’s managed to slip his hands under Harry’s dressing gown, undoing the knot and pressing himself close. He smells pervasively of lavender.

“What about Eliza?”

“My mum’s offered to babysit loads of times.” Eggsy’s swaying them to silent tune. “For the greater good,” he whispers with a kiss that Harry easily melts into. Tongue and all.

It does sound rather romantic.

.

_Once, when Harry was young, his sister caught a handful of butterflies in a small glass. She forgot to poke holes in the cover, and by the time she showed Harry, two of them had already suffocated. The third fluttered frantically along the bottom. It’s wings were torn from the efforts to escape, the sides of the cup too slick to climb. He doesn’t remember if it survived._

_Isn’t sure why he thought of it at all, really._

.

“Would you be put off if I told you I missed Eliza right now?” Harry asks seriously, still out of breath and hair askew from a rather raucous round of sex.

Eggsy’s head jolts from where he had been resting his ear against Harry’s rabbit quick heartbeat, his body snapping out of its sated state and into a sort of tense excitement in a moment, “God no! I swore you’d think I was a fucking tit if I said it.”

“Oh I’m already quite convinced of that, my darling,” Harry jests as his eyes flit over Eggsy’s kiss mottled complexion and swollen lips.

Eggsy glares, but his heart clearly isn’t in it. “Sweet talker.”

Harry hums, ignoring the sarcasm as he traces the dip of Eggsy’s backbone with his fingertips, “I do try.”

“We’ll see her tomorrow, though,” Eggsy tells him softly. All his false ire has fled under Harry’s gentle touch, not that it had been created for longevity in the first place. He lays a hand flat on Harry’s chest and rests his chin atop the back of it. “Only been a day and a half.”

Their extended Valentine’s Day date was meant to be special. To pull them out of the hectic and exhausting rut that Eliza had dug out for them.

And it had been. It had been…absolutely lovely.

But he missed his Lizzy something desperate, something aching. He had never thought he would feel this sort of love. What he feels for Eggsy is impossible enough. But this? This unconditional, permanent sort of emotion that feels like it’s grown from within him instead of from without. It had been so out of the realm of possibility that it wasn’t even a thought.

He would pack up his things right now if he didn’t know that he would miss this time with Eggsy.

“We are rather hopeless, aren’t we?”

Eggsy huffs out a laugh, the breath fanning across Harry’s collarbone. “Think you may be right there, luv. She’s got us hook-line-and-sinker, that one.”

“Will you be the voice of reason? When I inevitably spoil her?”

Eggsy sighs and tells him, “If I must,” before leaning up for a soft kiss that lingers but lacks intent.

They laze about in bed for the remainder of the day, the murmuring of passing voices trickling through the thin of the hotel door. The light that filters through the curtains rises high and dips low as the day passes by them. They have room-service delivered any time they feel hungry and shower until the ample warmth of the hotel water heater runs cold and put on the minimum amount of clothes necessary for any given situation.  

The only complaint Harry has is the damn beehive that has nested somewhere outside their hotel window. Their faint buzzing intermittently seems to permeate the quiet, intimate moments of the day.

When they return to the house the following morning, the sound of Eliza’s cooing voice greets them along with a burst of the specific and undefinable scent of home that is so often dulled into obscurity by having lived in it. It feels like slipping into bed after a long day or a soothing bath on Harry’s aching muscles.

They pay the nanny and listen to the easy report of her stay, even as their attention is clearly focused on Eliza.

Effortlessly, they slip back into routine. The suitcases are left to idle in the entryway, likely to be forgotten until Eggsy finds himself unable to locate a favoured article of clothing.

“Good pick, that one,” Eggsy tells Harry in reference to the newly departed nanny whilst bouncing Eliza on his hip. The child gurgles happily and pats her open palm against Eggsy’s chest. “She seems like a good egg.”

Harry frowns. “Really? She felt…” but the words do not form on his tongue. Indeed, he can’t even seem to put them together in his thoughts either.

“You said you liked her before,” Eggsy replies with a curious tilt to his head.

“Did I?”

“Don’t tell me you’re getting senile on me already,” he jokes with a slow smile. He hoists Eliza slightly higher onto his hip and begins to move toward the dining room. “Now come on. The little monster—” he presses his index finger into the softness of Eliza’s belly, “—hasn’t eaten yet and neither—” he indicates toward his own stomach at this, “—has the big one.”

“Is that meant to be a hint?”

“A statement of fact, luv.”

Eggsy passes him by with a wink and a playful nudge on his way toward the kitchen, and Harry makes to follow him before his attention is diverted.

A distracting buzz emanates from the sitting room, pitched and steady and _grating_. So much like the buzzing in their hotel room. It must be the television, he reasons, likely idling on a blank screen. He’s surprised his ears even registered the frequency, especially when Eggsy’s much younger hearing did not.

He follows the noise down the hall—past Mr. Pickle still standing sentry and the wedding photo that has replaced one of the terribly dull paintings that used to hang there—to find the sitting room strangely…silent.

The noise has stopped entirely, and the telly is off as it ought to be, and Harry barely even registers because his eyes have caught the pictures on the mantle.

Well. One of them that is.

It’s of a woman—a girl, really. She was barely a teenager in that photograph. Her dark curls are tamed into an enviably flat ironed coif and topped with floppy cap. The colours in the picture are all tinted a vague shade of orange and washed out, and one of the girl’s hands is holding a cloud of cotton candy as large as her head while the other clutches the rim of her chair. She’s laughing at something off camera, white teeth bared in an unreserved grin.

Harry. She’s laughing at Harry.

The buzzing is back again, louder this time. Closer. Harry recognises it for what it is now, too low and uneven for electronics. It sounds like a fucking bee. They must have let a fly into the house when they had come inside.

“Harry?” Eggsy’s voice breaks in, concern lacing his tone. The sudden silence it brings is deafening.  

Harry does not turn. “When did you put this picture up?”

“Er…” he begins, and Harry can imagine the way he’s probably rubbing the back of his neck in his doubt. “Not sure, actually. Used to be in your office, yeah? Probably got it out when you brought that box of stuff home. Can’t remember putting it up at all to be honest.”

Harry feels as though he would remember if it had been up for that long. Thinks it would have caught his eye just as it had today. But then sometimes he does get—

“Should I not’ve?” Eggsy continues and Harry hears the note of uncertainty there.

Emotion rushes through him violent and sudden like a flood, and Harry turns, his arms finding Eggsy as though he were a magnet and Eggsy metal. Eggsy lets out an ‘oof’ of surprise followed by an amused chuckle and hugs him back as easy as breathing.

He doesn’t ask Harry why, and Harry doesn’t tell him.

The picture stays.

Lavender, lavender, lavender.

.

_There were always so many signs._

.

There’s a moment, a very simple one, that Harry adores just as Eggsy arrives home from another mission or a long day at Kingsman. It’s the sound of him coming through the door. So quiet and unassuming. Shuffling about in the entry hallway before the door by the stairs slides open. JB’s claws clacking across the wood floor excitedly. Eggsy’s gentle voice as he likely scrubs the little beast behind the ears, the snorting, happy little noises that come out of his squashed snout audible from even a room away.

Today, Harry is standing over the sink as he rinses dishes with sleeves rolled to the elbow. The baby monitor idles on the counter nearby, silent other than the occasional noise that Eliza makes in her sleep. Eggsy approaches him from behind, and despite his quiet footfalls Harry can sense his movements acutely. The romantic in him likes to believe that it’s because it’s Eggsy, but his logical side reminds that his keen sense of the room around him is more than likely a product of thirty-five years his field.

He expects arms wrapped around his waist and the press of a forehead between his shoulder blades. Eggsy is unusually quiet however, the stillness of his presence quickly piquing Harry’s curiosity.

“Is everything alright darling?” he asks as he places a bowl into the dishwasher with a sound that echoes unnaturally in his head.

Huh.

A handful of rinsed spoons goes next, and the noise crashes against the continuing reverberation of the dish before it like ocean waves in a cacophonous loop.

“Harry…” Eggsy whispers, hoarse and quiet. And far, far away.

It’s the smell he notices now. The pungent stench of disinfectant stings his nostrils to the point of shock. Its overwhelming, and Harry automatically searches for the source. With each breath he can feel himself grow dizzy.

The space feels bigger than it ought, everything within pulling away from Harry to the point of resistance. Like that balloon that he he had sometimes felt he was living within had been inflated to its capacity, but the air just _kept coming_.

He turns to face Eggsy, to tell him that he isn’t feeling quite himself, but before he can lift his head to look him in the eye, Eggsy has him by the face. He shakes Harry with such violence and painful force that it frightens him.

“Wake up! _Please_ !” Eggsy’s practically yelling, grip clawing at Harry’s cheeks. There are tears streaming down Eggsy’s face that give his cheeks an ugly shine.  “Harry, _open your eyes!”_

Harry’s stomach rolls in fear, panic taking over as he watches his husband’s expression contort in agony.

“What are you talking about?” he asks plaintively. He presses backward against the sink until the lip of it is digging into the small of his back in an attempt to escape Eggsy’s unusually painful grasp. There’s a strange cold along his spine and down the length of his legs. Not a chill but like laying on the cool and sterile of a metal slab.

“Harry, you gotta wake up!” Eggsy hasn’t moved from his spot but he reaches out to him. His screams—and they are screams now, though Harry can’t tell if it’s the volume of his voice or the sharpness in his own head—are deafening, and Harry is torn between escaping and pushing forward to help in whatever way that he can.

Then he hears Eliza.

Her wails resonate deep within him, too deeply for him to ignore even for Eggsy. Even for the love of his life. He bolts out of the kitchen, pressing by his unaffected husband not unkindly but still too urgent to be outright gentle.  

He makes it halfway down the hall before his world begins to shake. The force of it knocks him flat against the wall, shoulder colliding with something that cracks under his weight. Amidst the tremors beneath him, he catches his own reflection in the broken glass.

The shattered eye of his spectacles impedes his vision like jagged mountains, so he raises his hand to remove them. There’s blood on the frames, so thick and coagulated that it sticks to his fingers. He’s bleeding, viscous fluid oozing down the side of his face and splattered over what’s left of his glasses. His hair is caked in it. His suit—but no that’s _not_ his suit. He doesn’t wear those pinstripes anymore. Not since…

Not since...

Eliza screams again. Her shrieks are loud with panic and every nerve in Harry’s skin pushes him forward to find his daughter.

But he can’t even tell what direction her voice is coming from. It’s…it’s _everywhere_ and yet nowhere all at once. It echoes in his house, in his head.

His vision flickers white for a moment then back again. Back to the deep, warm colours of his home.

“Goddamn it, come on!” Eggsy’s voice yells in his left ear. The sound of him returns with such a sudden voracity that Harry startles away from the noise. He turns, expecting to see his husband near enough to touch.

Eggsy isn’t there. No one is.

One of Harry’s favourite floral paintings catches his eye though. One that he’d convinced Eggsy to keep. The wall has cracked around it, years worth of water damage seeming to flow from the ceiling and drip around the frame. The portrait within looks to be the source of some of the fissures. Instead of remaining in their eternal stillness as paintings _ought to do_ , the plants have begun to sprout outward. Their roots plait their way out the back of the canvas and beyond. They spread in all directions like the points of a compass. Jagged, wild lines cut and weave through the drywall. The flowers have overgrown the cage their rectangular frame creates.

It looks wild and half wilted and water leaks from the gashes in the wall as well.

His breath is coming out fast now. Panicked. Heartbeat so quick that he can’t help but recall the time he’d had three cups of coffee on an empty stomach and Merlin had banned him from the espresso machine for a month as a result.

His mind feels like it’s zipping in ten different directions all at once. Eliza’s sobs and Eggsy’s screams and the smell of antiseptic and the painting that’s fucking coming to life.

And don’t forget that that infernal goddamn buzzing.

But suddenly…

Suddenly…

…

Quiet…

Everything goes quiet.

The smell of sweat and blood and asphalt overwhelms him.

The black of the yellow lined parking lot.

A gunshot cracking through the air.

Harry turns to find miles and miles of cement and the clear blue sky and, in the centre of it, Richmond Valentine hunched over with a smoking gun in one hand. The other is clutching his own mouth, bile and vomit spilling between his fingers.

Harry’s knees give out underneath him and hit the ground at his feet. Hard.

He lifts his fingers to the side of his face where something warm and wet is sliding down from his temple. The skin is gaping and spongy and his skull gives unnaturally under his own prodding.

_Harry…_

His stomach lurches.

_Harry please…_

He closes his eyes tightly, sunlight seeping through the skin of his lids—

_Harry…Harry wake up…_

—and then opens them again. But instead of wide, Kentucky sky above him, there’s only blinding white and fluorescent lighting.

And Eggsy.

Eggsy, who looks half mad and wild and horrified and _hopeful_. He’s peering down at him through Kingsman issue glasses and wet eyes and—

“Oh god,” he sobs. “Harry—oh fuck _—fuck—_ ”

Harry…Harry is…where is he? What...what’s…? His fingers curl against what feels like cold metal, nothing like the stiff crinkle of the hospital bed he might expect based on the rest of his surroundings. Eggsy must have already pulled the IV connected to the inside of Harry’s arm free, because the spot stings and feels slick under Harry’s fingers when he reaches to examine the sensation.

“Eg...gsy,” Harry starts, his throat feeling as though it’s filled with sand. “E…liza…where…’s Eliza?”

Eggsy looks down at him with a furrowed brow, eyes lacking any semblance of recognition and uttering the one word with the power to stop Harry’s heart in his chest: “Who?”

 _No_.

_Please no._

“Like hell I need to calm down!” Eggsy yells past the roaring in Harry’s ears. Harry hasn’t said anything that would provoke such a vehement response from Eggsy. Harry hasn’t said anything at all. Must be talking to a Kingsman handler, he assumes. Merlin, maybe.

Eggsy’s trembling hands take a moment to grab frantically at the small, glass injection bottles that litter a nearby medical tray and shove them haphazardly into the pockets of his slacks. The extra IV bag that is beside them is stuffed inside his suit jacket. His hands return to Harry in an instant, as though they hadn’t wanted to leave him in the first place.

“Come on, Harry. Come on. Up. We gotta get the _fuck_ outa here.”

So _definitely_ not a hospital then.

Eggsy urges him to his feet with a series of demanding nudges, and Harry pliantly complies. His legs give out almost immediately, bare feet sliding over the slick, white floor and shoulder colliding into Eggsy. His muscles aren’t completely uncooperative, however. Just weak. Wobbly and untrained like a newborn foal. He catches himself, barely, and what his knees can’t hold, Eggsy supports for him.

“Can’t really worry about that shite right now, Merlin,” Eggsy grumbles, voice showing signs of strain. “Just get us the fuck out of here, yeah?”  

They drag their way through the halls, Harry fading in and out. At one point he even dreams. Brief snatches of warmth and crumbling walls and Eggsy’s face lit by sunlight as he dozes on the sofa at midday with Eliza sleeping on his chest.  

Harry’s knees go gelatinous underneath him sending his body startling and stumbling awake.

“No no no, Harry,” Eggsy implores. The real Eggsy. In the real world. Sharp and harsh and vivid. “Come on stay with me.”

Loud.

It’s so fucking loud.

The sudden whirr of helicopter blades thrums inside Harry’s head in a quick and steady rhythm. It’s too much, and everything hurts, and he does his best to focus on the solid weight of Eggsy against his side, bearing Harry’s bulk effortlessly. As if Harry _didn’t_ tower over his other half.

His other half.

Harry’s thoughts drift back to that very morning. The smell of coffee on Eggsy’s breath as they shared a good morning kiss. Eliza’s soft hair against his lips as he gave her head a gentle peck. The sight of her grasping Eggsy’s face between her little palms in the morning light.

And that’s when Harry sees it. Just as he’s being lifted into the Black Hawk, he does a scan of the area—a reflex, a habit he can’t shake—and gets a clear view of the building they are leaving in their wake.

It’s a barn. Dilapidated. Derelict. So ugly that no flora had bothered to reclaim it. The same building where Eggsy and he had wed now sat forgotten in bumblefuck nowhere, covered in its own rot and rust. The willow was there too. Of course it fucking was.

It all becomes clear. He had seen the structure before. Repressed it with blinding ferocity.

His eye had been caked shut with drying blood, and a rush of unfamiliar people moved in a blur around him. He remembers the barn growing larger and larger as they drew near.

‘Where are you taking me?’ he’d wanted to ask. He tried to, mind echoing the words in fading repetition. But his mouth was numb and uncooperative and his head ached like nothing he’d ever felt before. Sharp and pointed like sucking air through a sensitive tooth.

There’s a thick fog in Harry’s memories from that point on, interspersed with snatches of recollection. A face hovering over his. A conversation but not the words that make it up.

He stops thinking about it when the pain in his head becomes unbearable.

Eggsy’s left hand is wrapped around Harry’s waist and Harry takes a moment to glance at the boy’s fingers. No wedding band. Not even a tan line. His heart pumps a poison through his veins. A crushing realisation he’s had several times before. Many people have.

It was just a dream. For a brief moment Harry’s breath halts. All that. Everything. Every fucking, blissful moment was a pathetic dream of some sad, lonely, _dead_ man.

“ _Harry_!” Eggsy’s voice cuts through the fog once more, through the helicopter’s roaring engine and deafening blades. Harry focuses his gaze on him. It’s the first time he’s gotten a proper look at his darling boy. God he’s furiously young. And he looks so lost. His eyes are terrible at hiding his apprehension and barefaced worry.

His eyes…

Clouded blue. The colour they’d painted their kitchen walls, and then—

“Centralised heterochromia,” Harry says, a bit nonsensically. His dry throat makes the words weak, but he’s not speaking with the intention of being heard.

Eggsy looks terribly confused.

Harry wants to tell him he’s just realised that the Eggsy he had seemingly spent years of his life with—

Harry hadn’t even gotten the colour of his eyes correct.


	2. interlude. eggsy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _In accordance with every fucking cliché ever, it’s raining on the day of the funeral. In fairness, however, it is perhaps less a matter of symbolism and more the statistical likelihood of it raining on any given day in London._
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> Every story has two sides.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one got a bit longer than Harry's so I hope you guys don't mind! Pls enjoy!

_Eggsy...Eggsy wake up..._

He comes out of sleep like a shot to the head, an analogy that Eggsy regrets almost immediately. The sound of Merlin’s insistent but ultimately detached urging doesn’t startle him upright, however. His body is sluggish and his eyes, crusted shut from sleep, open slowly. He aches... _everywhere_ , a deep soreness that has settled into his muscles from the fight in Valentine’s bunker. His head is heavy from crying and his heart… _fuck_ , his heart…

Merlin stands beside him with eyes dutifully trained on the clipboard in his hands. The tapping of his fingers over the glass surface is the only sound outside of the jet’s low, idling hum.

He’s avoiding Eggsy’s gaze. A purposeful preservation of pride no doubt. Although whose pride is being preserved, Eggsy can’t be sure. Even from here, he can see that Merlin’s eyes are puffy and pink.

“Fuck, what time is it?” Eggsy asks blearily.  He straightens himself in his seat, tugging at his clothes as if he can make the mess of torn and cut and bloodied fabric look any more presentable than it already does. After a quick scan of his surroundings, he adds, “Where’s Rox?”

He very distinctly remembers her reassuring presence in the seat across from him, vision fixed on the tablet in her lap as though she didn’t notice how Eggsy’s cheeks had gone wet and the way his head was turned at a strained angle in feigned interest of the clouds outside his window.

“The facilities,” Merlin replies simply. “And the time is—” he brings up his wrist to peer into the pale face of the watch buckled there, “—eight past two hundred hours. We’ve arrived back at the hangar.”

Eggsy groans. He hunches over so his elbows are resting on his knees and presses the heels of his hands into his eye sockets until bright patterns burst behind closed lids.

“You’re welcome to stay in one of the Kingsman rooms for the night. Longer, if necessary.” Merlin pauses a moment, his voice going a bit softer now. “Do you need anything, lad?”

“A bottle of fucking tequila. The shite kind. None of that posh piss.”

Merlin seems unperturbed by the coarseness of that request. “Not a difficult order to fill. Although I fear you may wake up feeling worse for it.”

“Harry’s dead,” Eggsy states bluntly, finally looking back up into Merlin’s tired eyes. “Don’t think I could feel much worse, bruv.”

Merlin sighs. He ducks his head, seeming more worn that Eggsy has ever seen him, and tells him simply, “You would be surprised, Eggsy.”

Eggsy wishes he could help alleviate that haunted look in Merlin’s eye or the sloped set of his shoulders. He barely even knows how to bring himself comfort though, much less someone who is—as they currently stand—barely more than a superior.

Instead, he forces himself to stand from the plush, heated cushion of the airline seat, stretching out his tired muscles and cracking every part of his body that will allow it. Which turns out to be the majority of it at this point.

Out of the corner of his eye, Merlin winces.

A humorous quirk, being squeamish about popped joints, considering the handler’s line of work. It might come in handy when Eggsy is feeling more up to a little playful banter with his companions.  

If they even _are_ his companions anymore.

Fuck.

A few moments of stilted silence pass—Merlin tap-tapping away at the clipboard while Eggsy pokes through his bag to make sure all of his civvie clothes are still accounted for—until Roxy emerges from the jet’s lavatory with a cellphone pressed tightly to her ear.

“I promise,” she mutters a bit hoarsely, posture taking on a decidedly childish stance that Eggsy has never seen from her before. “Where are you now?” She rubs her nose inelegantly with the back of her wrist. Her eyes might be shining, but Eggsy couldn’t say for sure with the way her head is tilted. “Are you…are you alright? …that’s good …okay …alright I’ll see you soon …I love you too …I love you too, Da.”

“I’m sorry; I should have contacted—” Merlin begins almost as soon as Roxy has ended her call, but she cuts him off. Her posture quickly regains the militant, if a bit fatigued, quality that Eggsy is accustomed to.

“You have a lot to take care of, Merlin. It’s not a problem.”

Eggsy has absolutely _no idea_ what either of them are blathering on about, and he’s far too tired to care.

Roxy is the first to split from the group once they’ve left the jet in the hands of a mechanic and made their way through the cavernous tunnels to the Kingsman mansion. She departs with a hug (Eggsy) and a stiff handshake (Merlin) and doesn’t give either of them even a backward glance as she disappears down the opposite side of the fork in the hallway.

Not that Eggsy blames her.

Only after finding himself in Merlin’s office with a bottle of half emptied Jack Daniel’s pressed into his palm does he realize that Merlin had taken his request for alcohol much more seriously than he’d previously assumed.

“I hope this helps you to get some rest, at least.” Merlin can barely meet his eyes, and his voice is tense to Eggsy’s ears. It’s hard not to notice the concern, the _pity_ , rolling off of him in waves. “You’ll need it.”

It isn’t tequila and he sort of hates whisky, but he’ll take what he can get.

The mansion is eerily quiet as Eggsy wanders the halls with his bottle in hand, and the silence less that of a sleeping home and more of an empty one. He wonders if perhaps more Kingsman employees were lured into Valentine’s web than he’d previously assumed.

Even one of their psychiatrists, Eggsy notes as he walks past a small office with multi-coloured blood splattered across its walls like rorschachs. The doctor’s headless body dangles over his desk, and the bottle of whisky dangles from Eggsy’s fingers at his side, and the last fuck that he has to give dangles from his fraying nerves before falling into nothing. He doesn’t have the energy. There’s too much to care about and some wanker that wanted to watch the world burn to preserve him and his kind doesn’t even rank.

So he turns, carries on down the hallway that so many before him have haunted.

Eggsy’s feet drag him to the trainee sleeping quarters. His autopilot must still consider it the closest thing to home in this opulent mansion, and he doesn’t fight it. Soon he finds himself hovering over his old bunk. It looks so small. Eggsy wonders how he ever fit in such a thing even as he’s crashing down upon it.

He tries not to ponder too long on how the blankets are washed and folded, sheets tucked in those neat, military corners. It always unnerved him to see the candidate beds become ‘slate clean’ when someone failed.

They’ll be training new candidates soon, and he wonders: is Merlin Arthur now? Will they find a new Galahad? Is _Eggsy_ the new Galahad? He’s certainly dressed like one with the shattered remnants of his suit sitting solid against his skin.

He fumbles with kicking off his left shoe.

 _No_ . Denial hits him with sudden, sickening force. He’s _not_ fucking Galahad. There’s only one Galahad. But he’s…

Each heartbeat feels like a punch, and his breath catches in his throat.

“God, Harry...” He presses a hand to his mouth. He feels like he’s falling apart, and maybe if he holds in the sound then it won’t hurt quite so much. His sobs are pathetic little chokes that bounce around the spacious, empty room as his Oxfords clatter to the tiled floor below.

.

 **Today** 10:33 AM

**you**

_Hey its...the bloke who cried on ur arse for like half an hour? Figure thats a p specific description_

_Wanted to apologize for. That_

**you**

_Eggsy btw_

_Is my name_

**you**

_Piss i hope this ain’t a fake number. Fukkin humiliatin thatd be_

**Read**  10:58 AM 

.

In accordance with every fucking cliché ever, it’s raining on the day of the funeral. In fairness, however, it is perhaps less a matter of symbolism and more the statistical likelihood of it raining on any given day in London.

Whatever the case, the entire event leaves Eggsy with a sour taste in his mouth and a clenched jaw. There isn’t a body to bury, the reasons for which have left the air tense between Merlin and Eggsy for several consecutive days. Apparently the recovery of a comrade’s corpse is far from top priority for the agency.

Whether or not their newest Galahad is a raging ball of vitriol about that practice does not turn out to be a mitigating factor.

The ceremony is small and suitably dreary. Since there’s no need to bury a casket, they all huddle together under mismatched umbrellas in a little curve around Harry’s marble tombstone. The ground is unbroken. An overhanging willow blocks some of the rainfall.

Merlin says a few words, short and sweet and to the point but heartfelt nonetheless, and they’ve laid out a display of casket flowers where Harry would have been planted had it been possible to do so. White irises and pink roses and purple ranunculus as well as a few other flowers are interspersed with various types of greenery in a large and ornate bundle that Eggsy is sure won’t last long in this weather.

For a funeral, it’s rather lovely.

Absolutely none of Harry’s relatives show up, and it pisses Eggsy right off.

“Shoulda been more people here,” he tells Harry’s stone when he’s been given a moment alone there. His black, felt coat is flecked silver with rainwater, and his knuckles are white around the umbrella handle.

**Harry Hart**

**11 Nov 1960 – 17 June 2015**

A military seal is pressed above those words. No middle name. No epitaph. No mention of who the man had left behind. The headstone holds Harry’s secrets as tightly as the man himself, and so Eggsy remains just as much in the dark as ever.

“Sort of feel like no one but me even gives a shit. Don’t know why but it kind of makes me want to punch them in their posh, fucking faces.” Eggsy sniffles and rubs his cold nose with the back of his hand. “I won’t, mind. I wanna make you proud so I won’t.”

He toes at the wet grass, paying his Oxfords no mind and feeling just a bit silly for getting so emotional over a slab of rock.

It’s not just a slab of rock though is it?  

It’s Harry.

It’s Harry fucking Hart.

“It’s a horrible feeling...”

Eggsy almost chokes on his gasp when he hears the familiar voice so suddenly by his side. Thinking that everyone else had tapered off, Percival appearing there so suddenly gives the younger agent pause.

“Not being able to bury your dead,” Percival clarifies. He’s not looking at Eggsy but at the stone slab before them with the same bored expression that Eggsy has grown used to seeing etched into the lines of his face. “God that thing’s hideous,” he adds, and it makes Eggsy’s mouth twist into the ghost of a smile.

“It really fucking is. Harry would’ve hated it.”

“That’s Kingsman for you. Never give too much away, even in death.” Percival looks away from the grave, his gaze finding Eggsy now. Eggsy does his best to avoid it. He recognizes the way Percival is looking at him now from having seen it in so many others before him. It’s that mixture of pity and helplessness. Not knowing what to do with the unofficial Galahad. Eggsy was Harry’s problem. Harry’s project to fix. But Harry is gone now, and he left Eggsy more broken than ever.

“Come on. Let me give you a lift back.”

Eggsy nearly turns down the offer, not wanting to abandon one of the few remaining things keeping him close to Harry. Harry isn’t even fucking there though, is he? So instead, he nods and follows Percival down the gravel pathway, forcing himself not to turn. Not to look back. Not to think about the lonely, little grave in a sea of green and grey.

The drive is quiet. Warm. Eggsy spends most of his time watching the world pass them by out the rain speckled window. Or acting as though he is at least. His mind is miles away, as if he had left it with Harry in the cemetery that is falling further and further behind them.

It takes him a moment to realise that they’ve come to a stop back in front of the shop. That’s fine, Eggsy thinks as he gets out the car, he could do with a walk home.

“Listen,” Percival begins, breaking the silence and halting Eggsy in his tracks. “I’ve a top notch bottle of brandy in the shop. It was a birthday gift that I’ve never found reason enough to open. Today feels as fitting an occasion as any. Would you care to join me?”

The offer takes Eggsy utterly by surprise. It’s not as though the two of them have ever been close. Eggsy had only seen him a handful of times before V-Day, skulking silently in one corner or another. Afterward, Percival had spent most of his time recovering in the med bay from whatever he’d survived when Valentine’s signal had been purging.

Merlin had sent out warnings to only a select couple of agents for fear of more moles in the organization. None of the staff had been implanted unless through Valentine himself; they ran through Kingsman channels even on their off time and weren't in need of the free service that Valentine offered. Percival was one of those alerted, but had somehow missed getting the information on time.

“It’s something Harry and I used to do at times. Share a drink in silent company,” he carries on, either oblivious to Eggsy’s hesitation or all too aware. At the mention of Harry’s name, Eggsy’s train of thought wavers. Had he been a dog, he's sure his ears would have pricked up in interest. He feels that craving that all those in mourning would know. A craving to track down whatever ghostly remnants remain of the person that left them behind.

“Yeah,” Eggsy says with a sniff to stop the dripping of his cold nose. “Yeah, I’d like that, thanks.” He fakes a smile that he knows doesn’t fool Percival. Percival says nothing, and for that Eggsy is grateful.

He hasn’t ever actually lounged in the sitting area at the front of Kingsman Tailor Shop before. Usually, he ends up coasting through for a fitting or—in one, memorable instance that had changed the course of his life—a quick fuck with a posh stranger that turned out not to be a fuck at all but an offer of potential employment.

Eggsy tries not to think about that last one, especially today.

It’s late in the afternoon now, the sun kissing the horizon and casting golden light through a large breach in the clouds. The shop hasn’t been open all day, but even if it had Andrew would have closed their doors by now all the same. Percival slides his key into the lock and holds the door for Eggsy to pass through.

A security pad just inside the entry waits silently to be acknowledged, Eggsy knows, and Percival satiates it with this week’s code as well as a fingerprint for the hidden scanner. Eggsy doubts those are the only security measures in place. He’d be willing to bet that Merlin (or maybe one of his lackeys) is taking a perfunctory peek through the camera mounted snugly in the upper right corner of the small entry hall. He sends up a short, half wave just in case.  

Following Percival’s lead, Eggsy peels off his coat and hangs it on the rack with his umbrella once they’ve gone through the second door. He plops down heavily, automatically slumping down into the leather chair with his legs spread wide in a decidedly ungentlemanly manner.

“Would you like something other than the brandy to drink?” Percival asks with his back to Eggsy as he starts the gas fireplace, orange flames flickering to life with naught but a switch.

“Um.” Eggsy shifts uncomfortably. “What you got?”

Percival tucks a hand into his trouser pocket and motions toward the rear of the shop as he replies, “There’s a fully stocked bar in the back.”

“You’ve a fully stocked bar in a tailor shop, bruv?”

“Our type of clientele do tend to like their drink,” he tells him, and if Eggsy had not already known that the man was stoic by nature, he might have assumed Percival was offended.

The corner of Eggsy’s lips twitch, barely, “Posh twats, you mean?”

“And Kingsmen,” Percival states, steadfast in his seriousness. “So the brandy, do you think? Or would you prefer another option?”

“Nah.” Eggsy tilts his head back to peer up at the creamy, smooth finish of the ceiling. “I’ll just have what you’re having.”

He hears Percival’s patent leather shoes pad along the rug, retreating past the antique clothing display and into the back room.

For a brief moment, Eggsy recalls the first time he’d come to this place once again. The first time he’d seen these leather chairs and the stacks of cloth and the ornate fireplace framed by mounted elk and deer heads.

Harry had been sitting in the seat that’s diagonal from Eggsy now. The air smelled of clean and wood, and the man perched at the end of the sofa had been a complete stranger to Eggsy.

He won’t lie and say that he didn’t travel all the way from the Estates imagining that Harry might have some less than savory intentions on his person. He figured him for a military intelligence officer, handsome and posh and fit as fuck with a taste for younger men.

From that perspective, he ought to have been suspect. Ought to have never shown up at all really.

But he did. It was stupid but he did. Perhaps from some desire to be wanted, perhaps hoping it could get him and his family out from under Dean’s thumb. He doesn’t really know now. Harry wasn’t any of the things Eggsy thought he would be.

“By the by,” Percival begins, breaking Eggsy from his thoughts. “I don’t think I’ve ever been introduced to you properly.” One of his hands clutches the neck of a brandy bottle and his own, empty glass. The other holds out another tumbler like one might extend a hand to be shook. “Call me Alistair.”

“Oh, uh, right.” Eggsy stumbles over his response, still regaining his wits after having been caught out amidst his drifting. The glass is cool beneath his fingers as he accepts it.  “I guess I just thought you lot went by code names all the time.”

Perc— _Alistair_ cracks open the seal of the brandy and pours them each three fingers. He settles down in the chair next to Eggsy’s, looking a little less stiff but still far more polite than Eggsy with one leg crossed over the other.

He responds, “Usually only on duty. Barring Merlin of course. His seems to carry over quite a bit; I think he might secretly hate his own name.”

Eggsy’s mouth scrunches into an upside down curve in a mixture of consideration and loose acceptance. “I had wondered.”

Alistair doesn’t say anything in reply to this. A silence falls between them, and Eggsy fidgets under the weight of it. He’s unsure if it’s meant to be awkward or comfortable. Sitting with Alistair isn’t exactly an activity in which he has much practice.

“I miss him as well, you know?” Alistair tells him after a spell. Eggsy perks up at this, both for the mention of Harry and the onset of conversation to ease their tension.

“Yeah?” he questions. “You two were close then?”

“Harry was the first openly queer man Kingsman has ever had in its ranks as far as I’m aware. I was the second.” His voice takes on a distinctly detached undertone as though he is separating himself from the emotion. Filleting his stories down to bone and cold, hard fact. He avoids Eggsy’s eyes, focusing on the rim of his glass where he’s set it on the table between them. “It became something of a bond between us. That and a stiff drink.”

Something frigid and irrational washes over Eggsy for just a moment, and he can’t stop himself from probing, “Did you two ever—”

“No,” Alistair cuts him off and instantaneous relief loosens the tightness gripping at Eggsy’s throat. “I don’t—I was already...attached to someone when we became friends.”

“That right? To a man?”

“Is that a problem for you?” Alistair’s gaze immediately fixes on Eggsy with an icy quirk to his left eyebrow and a downward tilt at the corners of his mouth.

“Would be a bit hypocritical of me if it was.”

Alistair blinks away the hard look in his eyes with obvious surprise. “I—yes, then. To a man.”

Silence settles between them once again, and Eggsy can’t help but feel the uncomfortable urge to fill the gap with nonsensical chatter. He doesn’t surrender to it.

Instead, he looks down at his glass and tries to picture the two older agents relishing in their silent drinks. He imagines Harry with his skin warmed from the expensive alcohol. Imagines him sitting with his long legs crossed—ankle over knee—and leaned back on the plush chair, swinging his tumbler by the rim of the delicate glass.

Would he have on his glasses during those quiet moments? Eggsy can only remember Harry’s face without them a handful of times.

A wave of grief hits Eggsy square in the chest at that. This pain keeps retreating, like the tide, only to crash against his ribs not moments after he feels like he can breathe.  He’s drowning in it again and tries his best not to let his eyes well in front of a man he barely even _knows_.

“He changed my life,” Eggsy confesses, breaking the still, silent spell while rapidly trying to blink back the stinging of his eyes. “And it feels like I know fuck all about him.” He takes another swig of his brandy and lets it burn all the way down his throat as he avoids Alistair’s piercing gaze. God, he feels pathetic.

“He loved fucking with Chester,” Alistair volunteers and the deadpan delivery makes Eggsy’s brows leap a bit in surprise more than the statement itself. He’s unsure if Alistair is fucking with _him_ or simply trying to avoid the awkwardness of watching a grown man cry. “And had abysmal posture.”

The added information chokes a laugh out of Eggsy.

“That one I know.” He smiles, remembering the way Harry would slouch against whatever surface he happened to be sitting unless he was putting on a show. It amused Eggsy to no end.

 _I can get away with it as long as I know which fork to use,_ Harry joked once. Eggsy can hear his voice now. Can even see the slight twitch at the corner of his mouth.

“Had no idea he hated Chester, though,” he continues, tucking the memory away for another time.

“Don’t let his sage-like appearance fool you. He was the biggest troublemaker of us all.”

A thought occurs to Eggsy, likely born of that chip on his shoulder that Merlin was forever telling him of during training.

“Is that why he recruited me? To make trouble and fuck with Chester?” His voice is hoarse as he tries to fight through the sick churning of his stomach, and the hurt blossoming inside him. He tastes bile rising up from his throat, his grief mingling with anger.

Maybe he doesn’t want to know about Harry after all. Doesn’t want to hear how their friendship was nothing more than a massive joke between posh twats.

“He recruited you because he believed that Kingsman needed to change, to evolve.” Alistair is on his feet now and indulging himself in another glass of brandy. “He believed you could help bring about that change. Pissing off Chester was just an enjoyable side effect.”

Eggsy is grateful for the brief moment that Alistair has his back to him, because the wave of relief hits him hard. When his vision goes blurry, he can’t stop a tear from tumbling freely and another that gets caught in his bottom lashes. He does his best to wipe them away with the sleeve of his bespoke suit before Alistair turns, moving back to his own spot in the the comfortable room once more.

“I received constant messages from him of your progress.” Alistair stares into the middle distance as if trying to recall a memory. “How you had passed a test with flying colours. How you solved problems in your own way. The only time I’ve ever seen him so proud is when he made those shitty one-liners.”

Eggsy lets out a wet laugh. He knows exactly what Alistair is talking about. Can picture that smug grin so clearly he could touch it.

“He was very fond of you, Eggsy.”

And with that Eggsy comes undone. No. No this isn’t comforting. This is fucking torture.

.

 **Today** 4:53 PM

**+46 70 042 625**

_Your name is...Eggy?_

**you**

_lol eggsy actually. Hello there_

**+46 70 042 625**

_Oh! Eggsy, yes. I’m sorry._

**you**

_No worries luv. Get that one alot_

**Today** 6:11 PM

**you**

_This is...this is Tilde, yeah? From the bunker?_

**+46 70 042 625**

_Wouldn’t you like to know. ;)_

.

The following day, Eggsy puts on his most cocksure facade and beats the shit out of his stepfather.

Kingsman—who had taught Eggsy that a pair of shoelaces or a collar stiffener were as good as any weapon when applied correctly and that almost every location had the means to make a moderately effective explosive in their cleaning closet—makes Dean and his boys look like training dummies, and Eggsy feels morally obligated to treat them as such.

He thinks of Harry—effortless and flaunting and beautiful—and mimics with as much integrity as he can muster.

The imitation is subpar at best.

He counts himself lucky, however, for how easy it is to get Michelle and Daisy out from under Dean’s thumb. He knows that in most cases of domestic abuse, it wouldn’t be quite so simple as swooping in like some glorified knight in shining armor.

The situation is generally pretty shitty, but Eggsy will take whatever little mercies he can get. He’ll need to set Michelle up with a counselor, either way. He doesn’t know if she’ll need meetings for the alcohol or the drugs. He doesn’t think so. They’ll feel their way through.

After the fallout, he takes his mum and sister to stay in a posh hotel suite for two days before Merlin muscles the entirety of their belongings out of the Baker flat and subsequently forces Eggsy to face what he’s been avoiding since the events that led to his current employment with Kingsman in the first place.

He hasn’t had the courage to return to Harry’s home in the past weeks despite his own insistence on living there. It still feels like _Harry’s_ . Eggsy doesn’t want it to _stop_ feeling like Harry’s.

The air hits him like a knife to the gut when he enters, cardboard box cradled against his chest.

Every breath he takes smells sharply of Harry Hart. Clean laundry and cedar and hints of ozone. Eggsy’s adam’s apple bobs as he swallows thickly in an attempt to regain his footing.

There are a pair of expensive looking, black running shoes on the floor of the entry room, left at the foot of the large hall tree that lives there. The right one is tipped on its side as though toed off in haste. From here, he can just see where the insole has formed to the exact shape of Harry’s heel. Like they’re still waiting for Harry to step back into them and run out the door. Something about the idea of that steals Eggsy’s breath right out of his lungs.

“Oh it’s well fancy!” he hears his mother declare cheerfully as she steps through the threshold. Bags of his things and hers are hanging from the handles of the Daisy’s buggy. Michelle adds, “Bit drab though,” as she gets a better view of a few uninspired landscapes and etching that hang in cluttered patterns across the walls.

Eggsy feels his insides tighten. His knee jerk reaction is to spit anger, to snap back at her for speaking ill of Harry’s house. She never knew him, not beyond being the bearer of bad news so long ago. Who is she to judge?

It’s an irrational response, he knows. Especially toward his mother who can’t be blamed for not knowing how tightly Eggsy holds the memory of the previous owner to his chest. How selfishly he guards it.  

“I’d like to leave it as it is, Mum,” he requests, “if that’s alright.” He knows his smile doesn’t reach his eyes, and clearly so does Michelle as her own grin ghosts away from her face.

“Sure, babes,” she says, placing an open palm to the space between Eggsy’s shoulder blades and rubbing in a gentle circle there. “It’s your house after all.”

She follows Eggsy further into the house until he leads them to the large dining room table where they rest their things on the expensive, polished wood.

Arms now unfettered, Eggsy shoves his hands into his pockets and shuffles his feet. He doesn’t even know where he’s meant to begin, so he distracts himself by giving them a small tour of the place. When they reach the downstairs bathroom, Eggsy can already feel Mr. Pickle’s sad, beady eyes staring out at him. Forever waiting for his master to come home and dust him off.

“Oh, fuck!” Michelle startles when she sees the mounted creature for herself. Her eyes are wide with a mixture of disbelief and discomfort. “Who puts a stuffed dog over their toilet? And what’s with the bugs?”

Eggsy doesn’t answer either of these questions. He attempts not to think of his own reaction to same thing. His immediate, _biting_ insult. The word ‘freak’ sharp and hateful on his tongue. One of the last things he’d ever said to the man before he died.

Instead, he closes the door, trying hard to maintain an impassive expression. The answer is too much to say aloud anyway.

Once they reach the upstairs landing, he shows them the bedrooms straight away.

For the time being, Michelle and Daisy will stay in the spare room. Or ‘guest room’ as Harry had called it what feels like a lifetime ago. The sheets are still as clean and untouched as when Eggsy had been meant to sleep there on the night before his final test. Harry had clearly used the room as more of a storage space than for housing many actual guests, though. Boxes that have ended up there as a result of having nowhere else to belong are stacked onto shelves. One, small wall is dedicated to a wooden cabinet that is filled to capacity with paperwork and books, all neatly preserved behind a set of glass doors.

Eggsy’s eyes are immediately drawn to the large, bay window across the room. He remembers watching Peter Pan as a child and always being envious of Wendy Darling’s window. Now he has one of his own, right down to a wooden frame built for sitting.

He hates it a little bit. Hates it for being his instead of Harry’s. Hates this whole house for how it came to him. Hates it but still clutches it tightly to his chest. The thought of once wanting any part of it still makes his heart twist, a small voice whispering in his ear that he ought to have been careful what he wished for.

“What’s that room?” Michelle asks, her curiosity breaking Eggsy’s train of thought. He follows her casually pointed finger toward the closed door down the hall. He knows exactly what it is without having to look inside, without having to see the red walls or neatly arranged newspaper clippings.

“Just an office. Not much use for now so best just leave it, yeah?”

Michelle must see that odd look in his eyes once more, because she decides to abandon her own train of thought there.

Dinner is a somewhat surreal experience. They order takeaway and end up eating Chinese on expensive china plates, having no time or energy to make food when they’ve finished unpacking for the day.

Michelle spends most of the meal finding it all ludicrously amusing.

“So that’s what having a silver spoon in your mouth feels like!” she laughs, and Eggsy chuckles along with her.

The whole family is exhausted. Daisy has been conked out for hours, having eaten well before her mother and brother had gotten an opportunity, and it isn’t long after the two place settings have been cleared away from the table that Michelle makes to join her little girl. She makes to retire to the guest room for the night but lingers in the doorway.

“Eggsy?” she says, catching her son’s attention before he disappears into his own room.

Eggsy turns to give her a questioning look, his throat already tight with the thought of sleeping in Harry’s bed.

“You alright?” she asks. Her voice is layered with concern and softness, and Eggsy is _so_ close to breaking. So close to letting his façade crumble, to allowing himself the release of being visibly miserable in front of the one person who might be able to comfort him. He’s tired of faking an ease with his new life. He’s tired of having to cope with the price he paid to get there.

“I’m fine, Mum.” But he lies. For everyone’s sake except his own, he lies. “Just a bit knackered, is all.” He knows it’s a shitty excuse and so does his mum, so he adds, “To be honest I’m still finding a bit hard to believe we’ve got such a nice place.”

This, at least, seems to convince her a little more. She grins, steps out of the guest room doorway, and walks across the short space between them so she can rest a gentle hand to the side of Eggsy’s jaw.

“And it’s all thanks to you. I’m _so_ proud.” She gives him a light peck on the cheek before adding softly, “Night, babes.”

“Night, Mum,” he returns in kind before both take to their respective rooms.

He stands alone in the space that is now his own, hovering over the king-sized bed. He’s been dreading this moment ever since he stepped foot inside this haunted, fucking house. Slowly, Eggsy lets his fingers glide along the Egyptian cotton sheets that are folded back over the comforter in a crisp line before turning down the bed.

He tries not to think of anything as he climbs inside. Tries not to feel so ridiculously small and engulfed by such a large mattress. Tries not to think about the last time he laid on this bed. But he can’t. The sheets…the sheets still smell of Harry.

He buries his nose there in the pillow where the scent is strongest and allows it to hurt. He lets the grief and the sorrow and the misery wash over in a tidal wave that nearly chokes him. The smell of Harry is right there and so concentrated that it feels as though Eggsy could reach out and touch him. Like the tips of his fingers are brushing the clean lines of his suit but no matter how he strains and grasps and pushes, he can’t get even the barest centimeter closer. Just out of reach.

He imagines Harry here, curled up on his side or reading with the glasses that are still resting atop the open book on his bedside table. A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood. A terrible habit, laying it open on the binding like that.

He imagines Harry snoring. Harry with his morning tea. Harry stubbornly burrowing into the pillows in the morning. Harry with Eggsy’s legs around his hips and pressing Eggsy into the softness of these sheets...

He can’t say how long he lies awake, can’t say how much time he spends swimming in Harry like this. He tries not to check the clock, but the minutes slip silently into hours and the hours cumulate together like flakes of snow nevertheless.

“Eggy,” a small, familiar voice begins, sounding sleepy and confused. Daisy has only just started saying his name. Or…trying to at least.  

Eggsy hastily wipes his eyes with the back of his wrist. He isn’t sure why he does it actually. It’s not as though she has anyone to tell or even enough words with which to tell them. Not to mention that she likely won’t even remember it in the morning.

Daisy is standing at the foot of the bed, holding herself up on the edge with her tiny hands clutching at the dark blankets. She has very little trouble walking, but her legs are still wobbly yet.

“Hey there, Dais,” Eggsy says softly as he sits up in bed. He does his utmost to keep the thick sound from his words and replace it with an upbeat lilt so she won’t sense the grief in the air. “What you doing up, hm?”

He would ask how she got here at all—not that it would do much good by means of explanation—but Daisy seems to have a bit of a built in homing device when it comes to Eggsy and his mum. Plus they haven’t set up a crib for the brief stay in Eggsy’s house. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway; the girl’s an escape artist if ever there was one.

She’s struggling to tug herself up onto the mattress before Eggsy has even finished talking. Her fingers strain to retain purchase on the smooth fabric of the blankets and her toes dig into the side of the cushion. Eggsy doesn’t even have time to move toward helping her before she’s halfway onto the bed, belly pressed to cotton and stubby legs pushing her body the rest of the way up.

Daisy crawls up to his lap once she has bested the mountainous terrain. She pats Eggsy’s cheeks with a simple but slurred, “Wet,” before wrapping her little arms around his neck and finding a cozy nook on his shoulder to rest her head. Her breath tickles at his hairline.

“Yeah,” Eggsy concedes. He feels the familiar lump rising in his throat and a warm prickling near his tear ducts. “Can you keep a secret, luv?”

Daisy nods against his throat.

“It don’t make fuck all difference,” he whispers against the top of her brown curls, not bothering to censor himself just this once, “but I think I love him.”

It might just be the worst realization he could possibly have in the wake of what had happened to the world. To Harry. Eggsy had known before that he cared for the man, was damn infatuated in fact. But he never owned up to that word. Not so soon or so easily or for someone so terribly far out of his reach.

Even farther now.

And he misses him. Eggsy misses the man that he loves. Every, little, _stupid_ piece of him, so much that it aches.

Eggsy misses Harry.

Eggsy _loves_ Harry.

And Harry is never coming back.

Perhaps he’s just imagining things, but Eggsy could swear he feels the little arms around his neck hold him tighter in response.

.

 **Yesterday** 8:50 PM

**Tilde (???)**

_[A photo of Princess Tilde, taken at a selfie angle and slightly cropped. Her blonde hair is bound in a high ponytail, and she’s wearing minimal makeup so the vaguest hint of freckles are dusted across the bridge of her nose. She has a cashmere, chevron scarf wrapped around her neck. Blue eyes stand out vividly against her pale face.]_

**Today** 3:06 PM

**you**

_Shes like...semi famous tho_

_Coulda got the pic anywhere_

**Tilde (???)**

_You hadn’t even mentioned that I might be a princess._

**you**

_Might be anybody really_

**Tilde (???)**

_Does anyone at all think you are funny?_

.

“You ever been fucked on a cloud b’fore?” Eggsy slurs nonsensically. He is, admittedly, slightly inebriated. Or perhaps a touch more than ‘slightly’, but really, who’s counting?

(Brandon and Jamal. Brandon and Jamal are counting.)

“You wot?”

“Eggsy, mate, I ain’t ever been fucked at all,” Jamal replies with a laugh at his own joke as he tips back his third pint. On Eggsy’s tab. Jamal wipes the foam from his lip, elbow nudging at Brandon who has remained suspiciously silent despite being—as far as Jamal and Eggsy are aware—painfully straight as well.

“Ain’t that right, Brandon?” Jamal probes. Instead of the easy acknowledgement expected though, Brandon shrugs his shoulders in a vague sort of gesture. For his part, Eggsy is a little too drunk (and _way_ too bi) to display anything but a modest interest. Jamal, on the other hand, downright _gapes_.

“Wot? Nina likes pegging, and I ain’t opposed.” Brandon sticks out his chin defiantly and takes a gulp of his own beer.

“...really?” Jamal questions with an interested colour to his surprise.

“You got a problem with it?”

“No, no! Just didn’t expect it s’all.”

“You lot are a terrible support system,” Eggsy mumbles and rests his head in one propped up hand so he can stare down into his beer.

Brandon and Jamal seem to have grown used to this new Eggsy. Everyone was affected by V-Day. They all lost someone, but he knows that he makes it more difficult for them by refusing to talk about his loss.

“What’s that even mean?” Brandon asks, obviously doing his best to change the subject. “Being fucked on a cloud?”

“Harry’s bed sheets. They’re so soft,” and he’s gone again. Lost to a sad train of thought that sweeps him away from the sticky little table at the Prince and the memories that swarm this place like an angry hornet’s nest. Eggsy is pretty sure they’d brought him here because the boys thought it might cheer him up to have a chin wag at the old local. They couldn’t have known how steeped this place is in Harry to him. It’s tainted by the man. Instead of the relief his friends had expected, Eggsy felt his face stiffen into a mask of stoicism that lasted until he was drunk enough to let the sadness pour out.

“Eggsy, mate, tell us more about this Harry bloke,” Brandon suggests.

“He was my... _friend_ —” Eggsy’s voice becomes even more slurred as his latest drink hits him. He wonders if his tone shows any of the rage that he feels coiling in his belly irrationally. His mates know Harry was the one to whisk Eggsy away long before the world almost ended. They know that he’s the reason behind Eggsy’s good fortune. They know he didn’t live past V-Day. “—an’ he died promising shit he couldn’t fucking deliver.”

“Sounds like a prick.”

“Death’s a good excuse to break a promise, bruv,” Jamal interjects. “I’m sorry, Eggsy. My cousin and his family all got wiped out too. They were on a bus when it happened. Fucking brutal, that.”

Eggsy takes comfort where he can find it and gives Jamal a grateful nod for his words.

“‘Sides, yaknow...” Jamal takes on a more sombre note. “Ryan.”

“Yet Dean and his lot survive. How the fuck’s that work?” Brandon grouses and leans back in the pub’s creaking, wooden chair.

“Sod’s law,” Jamal answers.

Eggsy finishes his drink in one swig and stands abruptly, claiming he needs to piss. Which is, if he had to put his finger on it, about when everything goes to hell.

“I think he needs more help than we got to give,” Brandon says in a low voice. He thinks Eggsy can’t hear him. Doesn’t matter anyhow. His friend isn’t saying anything Eggsy doesn’t already know.

Still makes his nostrils flare in irritation though.

“Obviously. But Eggsy isn’t go—”

A thud diverts his attention abruptly from the conversation, and it takes Eggsy a surprisingly long moment before he realizes that the sound came from his own shoulder colliding with that of another punter. Things go a bit blurry from there. He thinks maybe he tries to apologize at first, but it’s Dean’s boy. Not one of the dogs though. Lower on the the totem pole so Eggsy doesn’t recognize him at first.

His memory can barely grasp hold of the words that are coming out of his own mouth, let alone this arsehole’s, but there’s a comment about his mum and suddenly his knuckles are connecting with hard cheekbone and the world goes into sharp focus.  

“You watch your _fucking_ mouth!” Eggsy shouts as he tries his best to push away from where the other man has a hold on him in retaliation. There are other hands on him, he realizes. His mates pulling him away.

“Eggsy, bruv! Calm down!”

“Next time you visit Dean, tell him you weren’t worth the fucking black eye!” Eggsy yanks his shoulder away from Brandon’s grip and storms past him as well as the the rest of the pub. The air outside is a sudden burst of cold that smacks him in his overheated face and his stomach is _rolling_.

 _Fuck. Fucking fuck,_ he thinks as his vision swims.

He hears his friends follow him out the the pub exit and around the corner just as he’s bending over to hurl into the gutter, his own vomit burning at his throat

He really doesn’t remember eating anything that colour.

“You sure you’re alright to take him?” Jamal double checks once they’ve got Eggsy sorted a few moments later. He hoists Eggsy’s arm over Brandon and releases their drunken friend from his own support. Instantly, Eggsy leans into the new weight at his side.

“Yeah, no worries. He’ll pass out the moment I drop him on the couch.” Brandon doesn’t live far from the pub—walking distance in fact, which is great after he’s had a few—and must have offered to keep an eye on Eggsy until he could at least wake up to regret the night before. Eggsy actually can’t fully recall the exchange with the way his memory dips in and out.

They say their goodbyes (or more accurately, Brandon and Jamal say their goodbyes while Eggsy makes a noise that could mean anything really), and Eggsy presses easily into Brandon’s side as they make their way down the sidewalk.

Brandon’s place always smells heavy and warm and a bit like the stale dishes from the sink that’s only a few long strides from the door, usually left overflowing because Nina and Brandon are both shit at washing them. It sounds like it ought to be disgusting, Eggsy knows, especially with a belly still churning with too much alcohol. Yet somehow it’s rather comforting in its familiarity.

“You two get pissed or summat?” Nina’s sweet voice asks from where she’s sitting on the floor in front of the telly. Her long, thin fingers dart along the PS4 controller and Eggsy tries with no success to steady his swimming vision enough to pick out what game it is she’s playing.

Nina is lovely though. All...deep, lovely brown as her skin is and long box-braids pushed to one side over a slumped shoulder. Way too good for Brandon. Way too fit.

“Thanks, I think?” Nina says with her brows scrunched up in confusion and oh. He must be talking out loud now.

“Sure are, mate,” Brandon replies. His voice strains a bit as he tries to settle his friend down on the sofa with as much grace as possible. Which turns out to be not that much at all. Eggsy kicks out his legs in what he thinks is a very subtle maneuver to lay down but actually makes him look like a petulant child that doesn’t want to get into bed. “And my hospitality don’t extend to my girl, if you get me.”

Eggsy only grunts in response, he’s sure of that this time. He doesn’t want Nina anyway. Doesn’t want anybody really. Nobody but…

He throws an arm over his eyes and groans, a dramatic sounding thing with a fake, little sob in quick succession that belies the very real truth of the pain behind it. His mates took him out to get their minds off the world going in the shitter and all he could do was mope about while getting shit faced. God he’s a terrible friend.

“Fuck I’m a terrible friend,” he tells the spinning, nauseating darkness behind his eyelids.

“You ain’t.” Brandon prods at Eggsy’s arm until he lifts it. “C’mon. Can’t let you sleep till your stomach’s all sorted.”

“M’stomach is fine,” but Eggsy bends up his knees to make room anyhow, toes tucking under Brandon’s thigh once he’s settled down on the other side of the sofa.

“I’ve known you half your life, Unwin. Even if I didn’t, you ain’t fooling no one. Sit up and have some ginger water. I gotta pot if you need to spew again.”

It’s a kind gesture. _Poetic, even_ , a sarcastic little voice quips in the back of Eggsy’s head. If it sounds a fuckton like a man who had a voice as smooth and warm and bitter sweet as melting chocolate, Eggsy isn’t going to acknowledge it.  

They stay there, cramped together on the couch and Eggsy sipping lazily on his drink, for several long minutes before Brandon is satisfied that Eggsy won’t be asphyxiating in his sleep. Nina turns off the console and gives her boyfriend a peck on the forehead before heading off to bed.

She must think that Eggsy has fallen asleep by the time Brandon meets her at their bedroom door though, because in a clear but whispered voice she asks, “He alright?” and it’s obvious even to Eggsy’s murky and tunneled hearing that she _isn’t_ just talking about the intoxication.

“Had a rough couple weeks, I think,” Brandon informs her vaguely.

Eggsy rolls over onto his side, curling up until his knees are pressed to the cushions on the back of the couch. His chin bunches up of its own accord and he tries to tell himself that it’s just a passing wave of sorrow that hits him square in the chest for reasons beyond explanation.

Right. Fuck. Rough couple of weeks.  

Sort of feels like the understatement of the century.

.

 **Today** 2:36 AM

**you**

_U lose ppl on vday?_

**Tilde**

_...are you drunk?_

**you**

_lol wat you doin up_

_And y’s that make me drunk?_

_Mean ye i am bustill_

**Tilde**

_It’s a very sombre way to start a conversation._

**you**

_U eva been fucked on a cloud?_

**Tilde**

_Is this what sexting is to you?_

**you**

_That ain’t wat im tryna do_

**Tilde**

_Uh huh._

**you**

_U lose anyone or not_

**Tilde**

_A few cousins. You blew their heads up as a matter of fact._

**you**

_lmao_

_Fuck_

_Wat my lot eva do to u posh folk anyway_

_Always down to fuck us over_

_We ain’t rats_

**Tilde**

_You’ll remember I was in that bunker. I didn’t exactly agree to the scheme._

**you**

_Ye but wat bout next time huh_

_Bet ur just panting for it_

_Ur all the same_

_If u ain’t they kill u too_

**Tilde**

_I think you should get some sleep Eggsy._

.

“Galahad, I will not repeat myself: get out of there,” Merlin bellows through Eggsy’s comm, but the sound of gunfire detracts from the sharp anger in their intermediate Arthur’s voice.

“I got the ringleader in my sights! I can take him out!” Eggsy argues from where he’s hiding behind a pillar. A spray of bullets assaults his cover relentlessly as his target’s men attempt to smoke him out. Debris dusts off of his cover in clouds of...stone? Drywall? What’s this thing made out of anyway?

“You are also surrounded and taking heavy fire. Your squad cannot take on such an assault.”

“Sod the squad, Merlin!” Eggsy shouts into his feed. “I can do it myself!”

He does a quick tuck and roll out from behind the thick column, taking down two of the assailants with quick fire headshots and running head first into the room just on the other side of the gunfire filled foyer. Like a bulldozer, Eggsy plows through the the waves enemy henchmen. He lets his bulletproof suit take the incoming lead, adrenaline thick enough to mask the deep, purple bruising that’s probably already forming underneath. He snaps the necks of those unfortunate enough to be near him and shoots the others within his range.

He doesn’t think; he simply _acts_. The small team that has been assigned to him for the mission is long forgotten, and without a leader they’re left to deal with any opposition that was lucky enough to be out of Galahad’s warpath.

Enemies flood through a set of double doors as Eggsy bursts in, and with a flick of his wrist he tosses one of Kingsman’s golden lighters to deter them.

The blast knocks Eggsy flat on his arse. His ears fucking ring with it, sound tunneled out but wailing. Above him, he can see the roof beginning to cave. It’s cracked now and straining under the weight it’s bearing without proper support. He kicks up onto his feet with a single minded motivation, the mission’s completion in sight, and very little attention to how much fucking pain he’s going to be in later.

 _Don’t think. Just do_ , Eggsy tells himself. Get the fucking job done no matter what. He feels more bullets impact his chest with unbearable force, but he doesn’t stop.

“Goddammit Gala—” Merlin begins, but Eggsy cuts the communication. Boring conversation anyway.

It’s not long before he finds the ringleader, an arms dealer who found his fortune in the troubled streets of South London. Eggsy wastes no time incapacitating him with a single shot to blow out his kneecap. He goes down with a wail like a wounded animal, and Eggsy feels a thrill zip up his spine as he approaches in quick strides.  

“Hah…it seems you’ve forgotten how these things work,” the man—a crooked little weasel with a thick East End accent and a face as pale as sour milk—hisses as he smirks up at the Kingsman. “Crashing my premises without legal authority is no way to conduct business.”

“Who says I work under any legal authority?” Eggsy asks rhetorically, kneeling on his haunches now and meeting the man at eye level with a gaze as lifeless as the henchmen he left in his path. There’s a glimmer of fear in the weapons merchant’s eye.

“Then I willingly give myself over to the proper authorities,” he says with gritted teeth and hands risen to the sky in defeat.

“Told you already.” Eggsy stands back up and brushes the debris from his bespoke suit. “I’m not under any authority.”

“I surrender!” he pleads amidst the cries of pain emanating from the path Eggsy had cleared to get here.  He ignores them, pressing the muzzle of his gun to the man’s skin and shooting him at point blank in the head.

There are a few more sprays of gunfire in the distance and _silence_. Eggsy’s body is beginning to ache now, and his ears are still ringing. When he turns the comm back on a few moments later, there’s a long spell of pointed silence on the other end before Eggsy breaks it by clearing his throat.

“Oh, have I been deemed important enough to include again?” Merlin queries, and Eggsy can practically hear the twitch Merlin gets in his left eyebrow.

He deigns to ignore the sarcastic edge and states simply, “Target’s dead.”

“I had noticed. So are his men, luckily for you. You can thank the team you nearly got killed for that much.”

“Little less of those dealers on the streets then,” Eggsy grumbles as he presses the toe of his patent leather shoes against the limp arm of the body at his feet.

“See me in my office the moment you arrive at headquarters, Galahad. Cleanup and medical will be there for you and your men in one minute. Don’t make them wait,” and the line cuts off, this time from the opposite end.

The plane ride home is awkward, to say the least. Mercenaries flank him on all sides. Men and women who had laughed with him and given friendly slaps on the back have gone quiet, their radiating warmth turned icy in the wake of the mission.

Though Eggsy feels acutely guilty for it, he won’t deny a touch of gratitude for the merciful silence their cold shoulder creates. It gives him time to prepare for Merlin’s loud and inevitable berating.

“What the fuck were you thinking, Eggsy?” the handler starts in almost immediately upon Eggsy’s return to Kingsman headquarters.

“I got the job done, didn’t I?”

“What you got was half of your fucking squad nearly killed, and Sterling murdered in cold blood!”

“Like I said. The job’s done.”

“Just because you don’t care about your own life doesn’t mean you have the right to risk those that put their trust in you.” Merlin’s voice always deepens the more his patience runs out, and that patience has been gone for a while. “This wasn't a world ending situation, Galahad. You could afford caution.”

“Well none of them got hurt, yeah?” Eggsy reminds, perhaps a bit louder than he had originally intended.

“ _This_ time,” Merlin replies. Pointedly. With finality. Eggsy’s jaw snaps shut in response, something about the words zipping through him like a shot. Merlin looks down at the paperwork spread across Arthur’s desk— _his_ desk as intermediate commander and chief of the Kingsman organization.

“I’m requesting you visit our on-staff psychiatrist,” Merlin continues, and Eggsy realizes now that his shuffling with the pages is some form of nervous tick. A way to avoid eye contact in an uncomfortable situation. The young Galahad scoffs at his words. Merlin pays him little mind. “I don’t know if it’s guilt over the people that died during those short waves of chaos or some lingering shock from having killed such a large group so suddenly and violently and after no evidence of having ever taking a life before…” Merlin’s eyes flick up to meet Eggsy’s over the frames of his glasses for a thoughtful moment, “…or if it’s grief.”

Eggsy’s stance is less sure now. His hands are shoved into his pockets and shoulders shrugged like he used to when teachers would scold him for something he very well knew he deserved. He asks, “’Requesting’?” with a voice as upstart as every copper ever called him in low voices from only a meter away, the words ‘little prick’ tacked sharply onto the end.

“Respectfully.”

“And if I say no?”

Merlin’s words are casual yet weighted. “I think you know the answer to that Eggsy.” He jots something down in the margins of one of the papers in livid red pen. Eggsy is startled to find—though perhaps he shouldn’t be—that the man has actually been reading the words that his eyes were skimming over.

But Eggsy _does_ know the answer to that question. ‘Request’ is just a pretty—just a _gentlemanly_ way of saying ‘order’. It isn’t a question, nor does it merit a yes or a no.  Eggsy nods and turns on his heel, knowing full well that Merlin does not need to look up at him for the message to be received.

He pulls open the mahogany door, creaking painfully on its hinges and heavy like the heart in his chest.

“Harry was quite reckless at times,” Merlin says suddenly, softer than before, and the sound of that name on someone’s lips stops Eggsy in his tracks. “A bulldozer of an agent really. But he wouldn’t have wanted this for you. He _wouldn’t_.”

Eggsy’s face feels hot all of the sudden, behind the eyes in particular and the apples of his cheeks. The hallway in front of him might as well be empty for all he’s looking at any one thing. It’s stupid and it’s petty, but there is a sudden and acute rage that churns in his belly. An anger that grits his teeth, muscles flexing on the sharp line of his jaw. An anger at Merlin for using _that name_ against him. An anger at Harry for being someone that could be used against him at all. An anger at himself most of all. For so many reasons.

He takes a sharp breath in and bites out, “Well it’s a good thing he’s fucking dead then, ain’t it?” before slamming the door shut behind him.

.

 **Today** 12:55 PM

**you**

_Hey. I’m a prick_

**Today** 6:47 PM

**Tilde**

_Only a little._

_It’s not as if that sort of thinking comes from nowhere._

**you**

_guess not_

_Didnt deserve me comin at u like that tho_

**Tilde**

_You’re right. I didn’t._

**you**

_M sorry_

**Today** 9:01 PM

**Tilde**

_Did you lose anyone that day?_

**you**

_Ye_

**Tilde**

_Who was it?_

_Sorry. That is too personal, probably._

**you**

_Uh...a friend of mine named ryan. This uncle that i ain’t fukkin talked to in ages too_

**you**

_And someone rly close to me_

_That last ones rly fucked me up tbh_

**Tilde**

_I’m sorry._

_Do you...want to talk about it?_

**you**

_lmao thx mate but I really fukkin don’t_

**Read** 9:53 PM 

.

The thing is, Eggsy gets it. He gets that psychiatrists are just doing their jobs. He gets that they’re there to help. He gets why Merlin wants him to see one.

That doesn’t make him any fucking happier about it.

It doesn’t help that on his way in, he catches sight of the previous patient. A girl about seventeen with a slump in her shoulders and long, stringy hair. He recognizes her immediately as one of the few people the arm’s dealer had locked away in a small storage closet, waiting to be picked up by his client.

The client Merlin had hoped to gather information on after his men took the crime ring into custody.  

The client who Kingsman knows is responsible for several missing person cases as of late.

The client that the dealer could no longer tell them a damn thing about given his status as very, _very_ dead.

Thanks to Eggsy.

The guilt settles in his gut like stone. They’d probably have released the girl to her family much more quickly if they’d had that intel, too.

God she probably just wants to go _home_ , he thinks as he passes by her and pushes through the sturdy door leading into the psychiatrist’s office.

The room itself is expensively designed but obviously newer than the rest of the mansion. It’s all deep, rich colors and clean lines that remind Eggsy of something Harry might like. Most of his house is horribly opulent and outdated, but the areas that were actually _his—_ the office, the bedroom _—_ those are very much like this.

The walls are painted in rich charcoal and the floor is a white, speckled tile. There’s a large piece of abstract art on the wall that he knows his mates would poke fun at, but he actually finds kind of wicked.

And at the center of it all is Dr. Avidan, who…

Well.

Is not at all what he expected, to be honest.

She’s barely half a decade older than him, which isn’t entirely surprising since he knows she’s a new hire, and her black hair is cropped in a short, slicked back undercut. The bit that really throws Eggsy off, though, would have to be the sleeves of tattoos etched into her forearms, the lines of them curling up to disappear into the arms of her dark button up where the fabric is rolled up to the elbows. A few markings even peek out just the barest bit over the collar of her shirt.

She is long and lean even sitting down but more so as she unfolds herself from her chair to greet him. In her heels, she matches him in height.

“You must be Gary Unwin,” Avidan says and her accent is incredibly difficult to place. She extends her hand toward him, nails lacquered glossy black and letters that Eggsy isn’t at the correct angle to read on the fly inked into the space between her knuckles and the bend of her fingers.

He jerks his chin up once in acknowledgement and shakes the proffered hand roughly. “Eggsy, actually.”

“Dr. Harper Avidan,” she introduces easily. Avidan motions to one of the chairs upholstered in a warm but pale shade of leather. “Please, sit.”

Eggsy does, his posture coming out some mixture of purposefully impolite and uncomfortable. Not that the seat itself is disagreeable. It’s sort of aces actually. He’d be willing to bet the thing was chosen for how cozy it is. Get people relaxed enough and they’ll spill their deepest, darkest secrets. The ones that keep them up at night and make their stomachs twist at the mere thought of them.

(The opposite works just as well, he’s found, but that’s neither here nor there.)

Eggsy won’t be fooled though. They get through with the introductions and the confirmation of facts and the ‘why are you here’ bullshit, and Eggsy clams up tight. Only so long she can keep him here, right? Best to just wade through.

The clock on the wall ticks the seconds as they pass. Dr. Avidan waits, patient but curious, with one arm draped over the right armrest and the other propped up by the elbow while her fingers press against her lips. Eggsy focuses his eyes on a fleck in the tile that sort of looks like a turtle if he tilts his head just the right way.  

He knows he’s being a bit of a cliché. The bloke in law enforcement (of a sort) who’s forced into therapy, so he wastes everyone’s time proving that he doesn’t want to be there by acting like he doesn’t want to be there because he _doesn’t want to be there_.

“Surely you got better things to do,” Eggsy sighs out eventually. He’s never been all that good at waiting.

Avidan raises an eyebrow in a perfect arch at the sudden break in silence. “I don’t, in fact. This is my _job_ , Galahad.”

If the codename still makes him uncomfortable while he’s working a job, it downright stings as it spills easy as you like from Avidan’s lips and catches Eggsy unawares. He winces a bit.

“Please don’t call me that,” he requests and hopes that his voice isn’t dripping with the pathetic sort of desperation that he feels. Avidan is all professionalism if it is, though, because she doesn’t mention it. Just nods a bit with a furrow in her brow. She had placed her phone between them to record so that she wouldn’t be scratching at her notepad nonstop. Now he wishes she hadn’t. Anything to make her questioning gaze flit away from him if even for a moment.

“Is there a reason you don’t like being referred to by your codename?”

“I’m just not used to it is all.”

“It’s been a few months since you were awarded title. What makes you still uncomfortable?”

“Weren’t really awarded it, was I?” Eggsy replies with a shrug. It’s true but his words are fishing. Searching for a reason that will fill that gap after the question of ‘why’. “Not properly.”

“Do you feel that you haven’t been given the same considerations as other agents?”

He shakes his head dismissively. “That ain’t what I meant.”

“Then explain it to me. What did you mean?” she probes further, bringing her hands to fold across her lap.

“I don’t know, bruv. Didn’t really earn it proper, did I? I came to be Lancelot, and I fucking failed. It ain’t like me and Rox was tied when the position opened up. She won. I was out. Don’t seem fair, does it?”

Avidan looks at him consideringly. Probingly. Her blue eyes squint in thought, and he worries for a moment that she’ll call him on his bullshit, really drag him through the mud for pulling answers out of his arse.

Well...mostly. He won’t lie and say he hasn’t thought it once or twice at least.

Instead though, she leans forward in her seat with fingers still interlaced and rests her elbows on her knees.

“Do you understand the point of the dog test, Eggsy?”

The question throws him a bit, but he doesn’t let it show. He lets out a weary breath and replies, “Not really. See if I’ll shoot a dog in the face for this lot. It’s pretty fucked up if you ask me.”

“We’re an organization that does some very fucked up things,” Avidan tells him easily before persevering on her original train of thought. “The point of the test is to determine the level of trust you have in your superiors. If you’re looking into the face of a perceived innocent and a handler is instructing you to perform an action that you believe would lead to that target’s demise, you ought be have the faith enough in Kingsman to know that we would never ask you to do such a thing.

“So there are only two logical assumptions to be made in that situation: either the individual is not quite so innocent as they appear, or your instruction will not end in the outcome you expect. It doesn’t matter if the candidate deduces this or if they simply act based on their confidence in us. The purpose is to determine if you trust the people giving you orders, just as the train tracks were a test of your loyalty to them.

“However, _your_ test was undermined on two separate counts. Firstly, it was administered by a... _compromised_ agent. Given your empathetic nature, it’s not a terribly large leap in logic to assume that you sensed this in him. Furthermore, you reported afterward that you had been seated less than a meter from your dog, at which distance even a blank might have been fatal. There’s no way this escaped Chester’s notice. So the result of that trial is clearly a poor indicator for your effectiveness as an agent. A case can even be made that it speaks in your favor, in fact.”

 _Fucking bastard,_ Eggsy thinks not for the first time in regards to Chester King. The rest of Dr. Avidan’s words settle into his bones the same way Harry’s had that afternoon in the toilet (the _toilet_ , of all places) when he’d explained to his failed candidate, his fallen star, how the bullets had been blanks.  

What had Eggsy been saying to Harry when he hadn’t passed that test? That he didn’t trust Kingsman? That he didn’t trust _Harry_?  

“Having said all that, though,” Avidan continues after a moment of observing Eggsy’s sober reaction, “I don’t think a feeling of inadequacy has anything to do with why you have an aversion to your new mantle.”

“Listen.” Eggsy rubs his eyes with one hand. He’s so fucking tired. “You _know_ why. I’m sure Merlin told you exactly why.”

“I want to hear what you have to say, not Lysander.”

“‘Lysander’?” Eggsy asks and he can’t help the way his lips _almost_ twitch at the obvious attempt at levity, slipped in so easily and unexpected.

“Not his first name but one of his many middle ones. He took to it for a spell in his teens. I wasn’t around, obviously, but my mother certainly didn’t forget. We’ve always called him Uncle Liz.”

Avidan states it so seriously, so deadpan that Eggsy can’t help but outright smile. Just a little. “‘Uncle Liz’,” he repeats softly to himself. Oh he definitely can’t forget that one. He nods to himself decisively. “Alright. Yeah. I see what you’re doing. Bit of personal on your part for a bit of personal on mine. Quid pro quo, yeah?”

“I would never demand compensation for the satisfaction of seeing my uncle get a little bit of ribbing.”

“Don’t knock it, alright? It’s working.” Eggsy gears himself for the words that come next. Ducks his head a bit and swallows the lump in his throat. “The previous Galahad and I...we were _friends_. So, yeah, feels a bit like a punch to the gut thinking of how I’m like...profiting off his death or something.”

There’s a heavy stretch of silence between them as Avidan takes him in with her sharp as hell eyes. When she does speak, he expects some statement on his guilt or perhaps a comforting remark about grieving over the death of a mentor. Instead, the words that come out of her mouth are an inquiring, “Just friends?”

Eggsy gives her a wry look at this and, with tone teasing but underlyingly serious, replies, “Don’t press your luck, lady.”

.

 **Today** 3:21 PM

♔ **Tilde** ♔

_My turn, yes?_

_It’s getting a bit tough, I admit._

**you**

_lol take ur time_

♔ **Tilde** ♔

_Alright, it is a bit personal, but there are only so many favorites to ask about._

_Have you ever been in love?_

**you**

_Damn_

♔ **Tilde** ♔

_Is it too much?_

**you**

_No it ain’t that_

_I guess that...ye I guess I have been, once_

_You?_

♔ **Tilde** ♔

_Once. And then I thought I was another time but I was wrong._

_It didn’t end well for you two?_

**you**

_U could say that_

**Read** 4:38 PM 

.

It’s odd to live in a house and have no idea where anything is. Especially when it comes to cleaning supplies. Eggsy’s used to finding them under the sink or anywhere near the kitchen. Harry, he discovers, didn’t have the same frame of mind, however. Eggsy _scours_ the place in search of window cleaner. Daisy had smeared tiny, adorable handprints all over the glass door to the back garden with what Eggsy can only guess is… jam? Ketchup? Random goo that only toddlers seem to produce?

It’s not long before he comes to the solid conclusion that Harry, posh twat that he was, must have hired a cleaner to maintain his tidy house. The only thing Eggsy’s found so far are tablets for the dishwasher, laundry detergent, and a bottle of dish soap that is so empty that Eggsy wonders if Harry was keeping it for sentiment, because god knows it isn’t useful anymore.

“Sod it. I give up,” Eggsy sighs as he reaches for the house keys. He leashes JB and makes his way to the nearest shop to stock up. If he’s going to live here, he might as well make an effort to make it livable and not feel like he’s stepping on a dead man’s grave.

It’s not long before he’s back with a load of supplies in tow. Mop and bucket, broom, _window cleaner_ , wood polisher, dusters, wipes. Anything he could think of to the point of almost being overburdened. JB doesn’t help as he excitedly barks around him, pulling on his leash and causing Eggsy to drop one of his shopping bags with an undignified fumble.

The spray can of wood polish makes a run for it and rolls down the corridor, bumping against the the door to the closet under the steps. It’s hanging open, likely left that way by his mum. It’s one of the small annoyances that comes with living with her, especially in that particular corner where the space is cramped enough as it is. She certainly never forgets to shut the door to Mr. Pickle’s room, that’s for sure.

By the time Eggsy has regained his composure and unleashed JB, the can has come to a halt after a small half spin against the wooden door. Eggsy picks it up, but his attention is caught by the inside of the closet and what looks to be a seam where the top quarter of the back wall—slanted to match the slope of the stairs behind—meets the flat of the rest of it.

His brow furrows. He’s never noticed that before.  

“Wonder if Harry Potter’s ever lived in here,” he jokes to himself as he knocks against the drywall at the back of the tiny closet and runs his fingers along the long, clean mark in search of any give. He finds it, ever so slightly. Eggsy pulls back to give the room a considering look. It take a moment, but the shiny, roundness of one of the screws that holds together the inlaid shelves catches his attention in the end.

Eggsy brushes his middle finger along the worn-smooth surface of the button there and presses.

There is no young wizard, but the moment the wall zips down and away in reaction to Eggsy’s prodding against the hidden switch, he’s faced with a fucking arsenal. Pistols, shotgun, assault rifle, _sniper_ rifle, and…are those grenades? Of course they are.

It’s not the gleaming weapons that draw his eye, however. Alongside them—not nearly as deadly but still shining under the tungsten light—are a vast array of cleaning supplies.

 _Of course_ Harry had the Dettol next to his sniper rifle. _Of course_ the mop was mounted beside the automatic shotgun. Eggsy can’t help but huff out a laugh. In the grand scheme of things, the thought of handguns carefully stored next to cleaning tools is nothing short of comical. Not to mention the _why_ of it all. Was the Mr. Clean meant to be a bloody secret?

He starts to put the items he recently bought in with the rest of the bottles and cans. Because he’s not gonna fucking throw them away just because Harry chose a _stupid_ spot to store the detergents. What a fucking pillock. Anger claws up his throat at the thought, cursing Harry for hiding his broom. For thinking Eggsy would _know_ to look for it there. Who the _fuck_ puts deadly weapons next to the mop anyhow?

His heart clenches deep within his ribs. Not because he feels a sudden guilt for pissing all over the previous owner of his home but because the man he gave his broken heart to feels like a stranger. Only now, in the midst of things he left behind, does Eggsy have the chance to learn about him. It all feels too little and far too late.

He doesn’t even realise his eyes are welling up with angry tears until it’s far too late to stop them. He hates this. He hates every bit of this. Hates that he’s falling even more painfully in love with a dead man. That the one reason he’s getting to know Harry is because he’s stepping in his shoes, taking over his life.

He slides down to sit against the wall and wipes at his wet cheeks. Lets the snuffling noises that he makes echo through the house, a monument to a man he’ll never get to tease over his stupid, fucking storage arrangement. The cupboard under the stairs feels like the essence of the type of man that Harry Hart was. It just took his death for Eggsy to get to see it.

He doesn’t even hear the front door creaking open or JB’s toes clacking excitedly against the tile.

It is rather difficult to miss Roxy when she’s standing just in his view from the closet though, peering down at the dropped bag of cleaning supplies and then sideways to find him hunkered down against the wall. She comes to lean in the frame of the doorway with a curious look in her eye.

“I could’ve helped you find them, you know?” Roxy informs him with a little dip of her head toward the arsenal of weapons and cleaning supplies alike as if she knows exactly why he’s here. The statement itself is confusing enough, and the strange familiarity in her words even more so.

“Looked everywhere, didn’t I? Why’d you be able to find them any better?”

She furrows her brow down at him with a queer tilt to her head that reminds Eggsy of a confused pup. He furrows his own brow right back at her on instinct.

“I mean...I know I never mentioned coming over here,” she replies slowly, “but I...sort of thought it was implied.”

He probably looks like a _right_ idiot he’s so confused. His eyes dart around the room for a moment like he might find an answer amongst the metal and gunpowder and disinfectant wipes.

“The fuck are you on about Rox?” he asks finally. Gruff but not unkind. That look in Roxy’s eye grows even more peculiar, almost probing as if she’s working something out in that sharp as nails brain of hers.

After a long pause, she seems to come to a hazy sort of conclusion. She crosses her arms over her chest and says, “Eggsy, do you know who my father is?”

“No,” he states easily, dragging out the vowel. His tone is likely just shy of rude, but his insides still feel scraped out and raw from the burst of emotions that he’s barely hurdled over so he can’t find it in himself to mind much. “Some posh bloke who wouldn’t approve of you getting chummy with a pleb like me, I figure.”

Roxy lets out a huff of only half amused laughter and presses her forehead to the wood of the doorframe. “You are...so lucky you’re pretty.”

“Not going to lie, you’ve completely lost me here.”

“Do you not remember the way Charlie and his boys used to tease me about nepotism every time I beat them on an exam? Called me a daddy’s girl?”

“I thought they was just being pricks. Charlie was always being a prick.”

“Why did you think I spent so much time in medbay after V-Day?”

“Lots of people we’d gotten to know were laid up there!”

“He drove me to Harry’s funeral, Eggsy!” Roxy exclaims, just walking the line between actual exasperation and amusement. “I mean I took a cab back, because he wanted a bit of sit down with you but still—”

“Wot?!” Eggsy shoots back before she can even finish that sentence. “ _Alistair_ is your fucking _dad_!”

Roxy finally abandons the illusion of casual indifference in her stance by throwing up her hands. “Oh my god Eggsy, _yes_ ! _Everyone_ knows that!”

“Oh come off it. Not _everyone_.”

“They call me a legacy. In _front_ of you.”

“I thought that was just a compliment for you being such a beast on the field!”

“I love you,” Roxy laughs, and her voice has wandered away from vexation and into general amusement at how obtuse Eggsy is being. “I love you, but you are _dim_.”

“Seems like…” he admits with what he will not acknowledge is vaguely resembling a pout. Eggsy rubs the meat of his hands against his still swollen eyes. Alistair. Alistair is Roxy’s father. He supposes it makes sense when he starts to think about it. There was that whole moment on the plane when Merlin seemed to take responsibility for not alerting Roxy’s father after she came out of V-Day unharmed. Plus the way Alistair seemed to ask Merlin how Rox was doing a lot. And then all the shit Roxy brought up.

Alright, maybe there were signs.

But then Alistair said he was with a man when he was recruited, so was Roxy the product of a failed marriage before that? Did she have another father? Or did that relationship just not work out in the end?

“This place is like a shrine, Eggsy,” Roxy tells him, cutting his line of thought clean. She’s looking around the closet and leaning back a bit to peer into the hallway like she’s taking it all in. It’s the first time she’s been inside the actual house since Eggsy got well and truly settled.

“It ain’t a _shrine_ ,” he defends. “I just...like it the way it is, is all.”

Roxy raises an eyebrow at him in disbelief. “There are ten portraits of dogs in the downstairs alone, Eggsy. _Ten_. And I’m being generous by deeming the whole of each portrait worthy of only one tally, instead of just calculating by the number by dogs within of each.”

Eggsy is about to champion Harry’s style against such insults—as he always does—but she stops him by adding, with a knowing and almost sad sort of smile,  “I know you love JB, and you’re certainly a good sort when it comes to animals. But you couldn’t even tell a pug puppy from a bulldog. You aren’t exactly the _‘ten portraits in the house’_ sort of dog person.”

And _that,_ at least, Eggsy can’t argue. If Harry had never existed in his life and yet by some twist of fate Eggsy was still here in this house that used to be some distant stranger’s, would those paintings be there?

...no. Not at all. He sort of fucking hates them with their beady little eyes and the cold, distance of them. He hates the creepy one that looks like a gremlin in the dining room. He hates the color of the wallpaper there too. Hates the stupid antique, globe minibar, and he fucking _hates_ Mr. Pickle.

 _God_ , does he fucking hate that thing.

It doesn’t matter though. Harry could have a two meter tall statue of a cock and balls in the center of his sitting room, and Eggsy would leave it there without even thinking twice about how fucked up that is.

The silence stretching between Roxy and him grows strained after a moment, and she must realise that Eggsy has no intention of carrying the conversation forward because she asks, a bit more subdued, “Where’s your mum?”

“The counselor’s with Dais,” Eggsy replies. “They’re staying over at my aunt Dot’s tonight. Looking at apartments in the morning, I reckon. Been taking notes on what she likes, myself. I’m gonna get her something even better than she thinks she can afford.”

“If I weren’t a lesbian,” Roxy says with a fond smile, “you’d probably have just gotten yourself laid on those words alone. Also, I can only hope that doesn’t blow up magnificently in your face.”

“You’re telling me,” Eggsy huffs, a bit of honest laughter bubbling up the back of his throat. He winks at her and continues, “And if you weren’t a lesbian, I’d be honored.”

“Maybe. You wouldn’t accept though, that much I know.”

“Why? It’s cause I value our friendship too much, innit?”

Roxy’s grin flairs wide and fades in quick succession. “Because you’re in love with Harry.”

Eggsy’s neck feels hot and his stomach jumps up into his throat. His eyes dart away from hers almost immediately. He considers denying it. Considers telling her she doesn’t know what the fuck she’s talking about. But he’s just so fucking tired of keeping it all bottled up, of having people pat him on the shoulder and offer condolences and talk about Harry being such a wonderful mentor or father figure to Eggsy.

A fucking father figure.

“...yeah,” he says instead. “Yeah, guess you got me there.”

“Oh so you’re admitting it now?” She sounds surprised but not disparaging.

“They do say it’s the first step.”

The air stretches between them for a moment, long and heavy. Roxy’s eyes are boring into the side of Eggsy’s head as she observes him, and Eggsy picks at a string in the seam of his jeans to distract himself.

“Want to watch sad films and eat our weight in ice cream?” she finally requests, voice just shy of unsure. Like maybe she’s never done this before with a friend. “I’ve been told that helps.”

“Yeah, alright,” he complies. Says it as if he’s the one doing her a favour when they both know that is miles and miles away from the truth.

“That’s the spirit,” she encourages and steps past him to shut the sliding door that had hidden the broom and the cleaning wipes—and quite a few gadgets that Eggsy would have liked to have looked at sooner frankly—with an easy press of the button like it’s the simplest thing in the world.

Eggsy tamps down the jealous, possessive churning he feels in his gut at her familiarity. He thinks, “This is _my_ house,” and wonders if, perhaps, it isn’t Harry that’s been haunting this house after all.

.

 **Today** 10:11 PM

**you**

_U will not fukkin believe wat the fuck i just found_

♔ **Tilde** ♔

_It doesn’t happen to be a cleaner vocabulary?_

**you**

_Oh har har miss we-can-do-it-in-the-asshole_

♔ **Tilde** ♔

_Haha fair. What did you find?_

**you**

_U ain’t a narc right_

♔ **Tilde** ♔

_A “narc”?_

_Nevermind. I checked online. No, I am not a narc._

**you**

_So I sorta like inherited this house or whatev from this super posh bloke_

_I mean posh but real decent_

_And cool cuz hes in my line of business i guess_

_Was Imean_

_Also he was like really fit but older you know_

♔ **Tilde** ♔

_I lost what you were talking about I think._

_Also I do not understand. Can people not be cool and also posh?_

**you**

_lol that sounds exactly like summat a posh person’d say_

_It ain’t wot i meant tho_

_Point bein he aint rly the bloke you expect to find w a fukkin bag of weed in his closet_

♔ **Tilde** ♔

_W H A T_

**you**

_Like really good fukkin weed Tilde_

_I legit don’t think i’ve had weed this good_

_Not actually a bag even but a nice wood box with roll papers and all that shit_

♔ **Tilde** ♔

_Are you high lol?_

**you**

_GOD yes_

♔ **Tilde** ♔

_You are actually pretty decent at texting while intoxicated, you know?_

**you**

_Didn’t ur mum ever teach ya practice makes perfect_

♔ **Tilde** ♔

_My mother is a bit of a bitch if I’m being honest._

**you**

_If that ain’t always the case w u lot_

**Read** 10:51 PM 

.

It’s been a long time coming, but Eggsy finally—and very slowly—opens the door to the office. Not the one at his house. He’s long since invaded that space. This the one at the mansion. _Galahad’s_ office. It’s much larger and more professional looking with an older and more ornate style than the clean lines and strikingly red walls of Harry’s study. Eggsy has been avoiding it for obvious reasons. It's the smell. Through the stale stuffiness of a room that hasn't been opened for nearly a month, Eggsy catches the ghost of Harry’s scent. Or maybe he’s just imagining the sharp, fresh smell of Harry’s cologne.

Eggsy was here once before, a lifetime ago. He feels like an entirely different person from the boy who stumbled into the same room so long ago. The lights are off now, but he remembers their soft glow. Then again, Eggsy isn’t sure if the warm light that follows his memories of Harry is real or a product of his own idealism. Back then, he was so much more reserved than he is now. The moment he flips on the switch, he notices a plethora more things than he ever had back then. Of course, he _was_ rather preoccupied. Harry called him brilliant. Stellar, in fact. Even now he can see that faded memory dancing around behind the desk.

It’s Eggsy’s desk now. Everything is, but he feels invasive in the space where traces of its previous owner still lingers. He’s considering a retreat when he notices a potted plant from the corner of his eye. The poor thing sits wilting away, long forgotten and unkempt. Eggsy glides over to inspect the peace lily and feel the thin, limp leaves. There’s a mug on Harry’s desk with rings of long forgotten tea staining the porcelain inside. He rinses it out in the nearest sink, topping it off for the thirsty little plant.

“There you go,” Eggsy coos as if it were a small animal as he fills the plate with water. “Poor thing. Nobody had any idea you were up here, eh?”

He prods the moistening soil with his fingers.

 _That’ll do_ , he thinks before diverting his attention to the mug in his other hand. It isn’t a particularly fancy thing. Eggsy had imagined fine, china teacups with pastel colours and gold enamel. This is just a cheap mug with pictures of butterflies printed on its face, their scientific names listed below and the words ‘Kew Garden’ along the base. Eggsy snorts. Figures. As if there aren’t enough back at the house.

He ponders Harry visiting Kew Gardens, though. There’s a butterfly sanctuary if he recalls. Eggsy’s brain goes soppy again at the thought of Harry visiting for something like that. He puts the mug down with a rougher thump than he intended.

That’s when he sees the photograph.

It’s a simple thing. The frame is black painted wood, and it stands no higher than anything else on Harry’s desk. Yet it’s one of the few personal items decorating the space. Eggsy leans in closer, sitting down in the chair for clearer look at the person photographed.

“She’s so young…” he murmurs.

“Eggsy?” Merlin’s timing startles Eggsy more than the sudden sound of his voice, but the man doesn’t seem to notice or care about the look of a frightened rabbit that Eggsy sports. “It’s a bit late, isn't it?”

“Just settling into my new office. Doesn’t really feel like it, though. Mine, I mean.”

“If I’m honest, lad? Harry didn’t use it much, either.”

“Yeah?”

“Can you really imagine Harry sitting at this plush desk?” Merlin asks as he saunters over to the seat on the opposite side of the desk from Eggsy and lets his hand slide along the headrest. “Doing paperwork? Catching up on logging and expenses?”

“Not one for a desk job, then?” Eggsy smiles. He had no idea honestly, and it sort of makes his heart constrict.

“And yet people wanted him as the next Arthur,” Merlin says offhandedly. His words don’t really surprise Eggsy. Of course people wanted Harry to be Arthur; he would have made a brilliant leader.

“Did you?” He spins a bit in his chair to face Merlin more fully. Merlin just…fuck, he looks so sad.

“I didn’t want any of this, Eggsy.” A heavy silence follows, and they both respect it for a few beats before Merlin sniffs and, with the fluidity of someone who knows his way around the room well, pulls out a bottle of bourbon from a  desk cabinet by Eggsy’s feet.

“There seems to be a lot of drinking in Kingsman,” Eggsy notes.

“We’re hoping Dr Avidan will change that a bit,” Merlin tells him and opens the bottle. Eggsy bites his tongue. It doesn’t seem like the best time to tease about family.

“Who's the lady?” Eggsy wonders out loud, his eyes glancing pointedly at the photograph on the desk.

“That would be Harry’s twin sister. Beatrice, if I recall.” Merlin walks away to dig for another mug after having filled the butterfly one with the pungent alcohol. They’re classy that way.

Eggsy takes the time to lean in closer. _Twin_ sister? He can see it now, in the jaw and chin especially. And the eyes, though it’s hard to tell because Beatrice is smiling at the camera. No, not smiling. She’s mid-laugh at the photographer while sitting on a pier bench. The photo is old. Battered, frayed and clearly taken decades ago.

“Where is she now?” Eggsy asks although he knows the answer already.

“Dead, lad.”

It’s not a surprising statement, not in the least in fact, but still Eggsy feels that slight tightening in his throat. Nothing severe. Just a thickness as if he’s fighting the tail end of an autumn cold. In front of him, Merlin places the mug of bourbon with a soft click against the wood, and Eggsy’s hands immediately wrap around it like it’s warm drink on a cool day. It is decidedly neither of those things.

He sniffs a bit, however needless, and asks, “How long ago?”

“Couldn’t say for sure.” Merlin pulls out a water from the cabinet this time. The cap of the bottle cracks as he twists it open to pour the liquid into his own cup. “Long before I met him. He wasn’t fond of talking about it, and I can’t say that I was keen on asking.”

Eggsy nods in a vague sort of way. He eyes Merlin curiously as that man screws the lid back on the plastic bottle and puts it away again.

“Jus’ water then?” he asks.

“Aye,” Merlin replies. Tiredly and with the sort of familiarity that comes from an answer given many times over. “Twenty-two years clean. Alcohol wasn’t my vice, but I do try to avoid it. Most of the time, that is.”

Eggsy blinks twice at the revelation.

“Oh,” he tries, ratherly stupidly in his own opinion. He wouldn’t have thought—well, Merlin just didn’t seem like— _well_. He supposes it was foolish of him to make those sort of assumptions in the first place. Merlin circles around to the other side of the desk and settles down in the seat across from Eggsy.   “Ah...good. That’s good then, yeah?”

Merlin looks mildly amused, at least. In his own Merlin type of way, that is. “I would say so, yes.”

“So, er. Cheers, I guess?” Eggsy says, still a little unsteady on his metaphorical feet as he picks up his mug and tips it in Merlin’s direction.

“Cheers.”

Eggsy takes a long pull of his bourbon, far longer than necessary for a simple toast, certainly. Especially one to nothing in particular. His eyes focus back on the photo of Harry’s sister when he’s done. She looks so young there. Happy. Maybe Harry was behind the camera, smiling as well. Or maybe he was out with his mates at the time. Or off somewhere nearby. What would Harry have liked back then?

“Probably think me fucking pathetic, eh?” Eggsy asks. “Feels like I barely even knew the bloke. Twin bleedin’ sister. _Fuck_.” Merlin doesn’t reply. Just listens, a little furrow forming in his brow, and Eggsy doesn’t know whether he prefers it over scoffing at the pitiful display that he makes or not. “You know he kept his cleaning supplies in one of them hidden weapons closets? Or that like...he’d sit Rox sometimes when she was little? There are goddamn twinkies in his cabinet, if you can believe that shit.”

“He did quite like his junk food. There are jelly babies in that bottom drawer there that he thought no one knew about.”

Eggsy huffs a laugh. He means for it to be sincere but it comes out rather humorless instead. “The fucking sweet tooth on that one…”

A quiet follows his statement, and he supposes that he understands it. What do people say in situations like these? Is comforting, awkward and unwanted, or...helpful? Is there advice that the other person hopes for? Words that will make it better? A balm for all wounds?

The aircon kicks on overhead with a dull roar as Eggsy studies what’s left of his drink. It’s flat amber and rather dull as far as things he could have focused on are concerned. He has absolutely no desire for another sip. Prefers it on the rocks, honestly.

“It’s quite normal you know, lad?” Merlin tries at last, and somehow Eggsy simply knows that nothing useful will ever follow those words. “For you to feel this sort of...distance and desire to be closer all at once. Mentors can sometimes—”

Eggsy stops listening right about there, a sudden and instinctual heat roiling in his gut. He’s so fucking tired of people telling him they’re sorry that he lost a mentor or a father figure as they expect him to grieve accordingly. He’s heard, ‘My father died when I was young,’ and ‘I recall the last time I saw the man that inspired me to greatness,’ from other people in the Kingsman organization so many times that he honestly fears that eventually he’ll roll his eyes in front of one of them by mistake and leave the conversation with a broken nose.

“We fucked,” he blurts suddenly, like a shot over a rowdy room. The words burst out of him hot and vulgar and a bit angrier than he intended, but—sod it all—he can’t be arsed to care.

Whatever Merlin had been saying, he stops cold there and looks more shocked than Eggsy’s ever seen him.

“I’m sorry?” he replies after a moment and Eggsy feels a bit of spiteful satisfaction that he seems struck dumb by the declaration.

“Shagged. Properly. On that...night after the test on the train tracks.”

“I don’t—” Merlin shakes his head, eyes closed for a moment like he’s trying to sluff off the surprise he’d displayed a few moments earlier. “Why are you telling me this?”

“It just fucking pisses me right off, yaknow?” Eggsy shoves his mug away from himself in a needless outward display of his frustration. “Everyone acting like he was some fucking fill in for my dad when I—”

He cuts the words off too late. Too late for his emotions and too late to suspend Merlin’s own understanding.

‘When I cared for him in a very different way.’

‘When I adored him.’

‘When I…’

‘When I...’

But it doesn’t matter what words Merlin fills in with his own imagination, because Eggsy can tell by the pity clouding his eyes that just that little bit was enough.

“I’m sorry, Eggsy,” Merlin consoles softly, and Eggsy hates it. He wishes he’d never said anything at all. Wishes he could go back and eat the words up instead. Swallow his own impulsiveness. Let the anger and frustration stick in his throat.

“Ye…” he utters through his regret. It’s barely even a word at all. More of just a grunt of understanding that bubbles only half voluntary from his throat.

The moment hangs between them like fog.

“I could…” Merlin clears his throat uncomfortably. “I could tell you a bit more about him. If you’d like.”

Eggsy shrugs like it doesn’t matter to him either way. Weeks ago perhaps it wouldn’t have. Perhaps he would have shrugged his shoulders like this and meant it. Not because he didn’t want to learn about Harry, but because he foolishly thought he knew so much more than he really did. Now, though, he’s been in Harry’s home and lived in his shoes and learned so much about the man through circumstantial evidence that he’s not even sure what’s true anymore.

So yeah. Eggsy wants to know. He wants to know... _everything_.

“Sure,” he says in a nonchalant sort of way that isn’t fooling either of them. “Sure, why not?”

.

 **Today** 9:43 PM

♔ **Tilde** ♔

_Hey!_

**you**

_Hey_

♔ **Tilde** ♔

_How was your day?_

**you**

_Um weird actually lol_

♔ **Tilde** ♔

_It has? How so?_

**you**

_I got an office_

♔ **Tilde** ♔

_That...sounds like a good thing?_

**you**

_U would think so wouldn’t u_

♔ **Tilde** ♔

_Don’t take this the wrong way, but I think you need to get out more lol._

**you**

_I’m startin to think u might be onto something there Tilds_

**Read** 10:00 PM 

.

The weekend after his talk with Merlin, Roxy takes Eggsy out to get laid.

At least, he’s pretty sure that’s what she’s doing. They go to some swanky, little gay club that serves the most ridiculous looking drinks that Eggsy has ever seen in his life but is loads nicer than any others that he’s been to before. Not that he’s been to many, honestly. Couldn’t risk it with Dean around. The man isn’t exactly the patron saint of tolerance as far as _that_ subject is concerned.

Or any subject really.

Roxy had clarified pretty early on that by ‘gay nightclub’ she did in fact mean _gay_ nightclub, specifically, and not just the blanket term for gay-and-lesbian. In other words, quite a lot of fuckabilitly for Eggsy but not so much for Rox. That, in and of itself, was a bit of a tip off.

There _are_ some ladies in the crowd, he notes when he does his initial scan of the area, but he has a feeling that a good number of them are here for the same reason that Roxy had stated. To have a nice night of dancing without having to worry about a shitton of unwanted advances.

For Roxy’s part, though, Eggsy is pretty sure that translates to: “I want you to get fucked, well and good, and I figured this would give you the largest pool of options available.” Because Roxy thinks sex is the resolution to most of life’s problems.

Eggsy’s willing to try anything at this point.

So he goes along with very little fuss, and he dances, and he _doesn’t_ drink because he’s starting to worry about his tendency to inhale alcohol at an increased rate when feeling a bit glum. The air is thick in his throat, hot and sticky from the mass of bodies crammed into the place at once.

Some bloke about Eggsy’s age named Mark or Michael or M-something sidles up behind him pretty early in the evening and the race is on. It’s easy not to think when he’s writhing amid other nameless, faceless bodies on the dance floor with the music blaring so loudly that he can feel it in his chest. Easy not to think when he’s in the back of the cabbie and a pair of soft lips are on that spot beneath his ear _just there_ . Easy not to think when long fingers— _not Harry’s, not Harry’s, not Harry’s_ —brush against his nipple through the fabric of his shirt.

It’s easy to outrun those thoughts—the thoughts that would keep him from having _this_ —when he’s constantly in motion, constantly feeding the endorphins _._ He wants it so badly. He wants the comfort of an anonymous fuck. He wants to be brought to the heights of pleasure without emotion or attachment or obligation.

Mostly though, he wants to let this fit, young man fuck him into next to Sunday. God he’s practically _gagging_ for it.

His jeans have already been undone by the time the two of them fall together in a heap onto Mark’s sofa. The room smells like some sort of mint candle and whatever body spray Mark had picked up at the local Tesco. Nothing like the Galahad house. Nothing like—

Eggsy peels off his own shirt in one smooth motion, and Mark’s mouth latches almost immediately onto the rosy peak that he’d been teasing on the way over. The sudden wet heat on Eggsy’s nipple sends a shot directly to his cock, makes him keen and sigh.

Thick hands slide under the unbuttoned waistband of his trousers. They circle around behind, dipping down to grab a handful of Eggsy’s arse through the cotton of his boxer-briefs and pull him nearer.

He reaches for Mark’s buckle, hands shaking as they fumble with the cool metal. Mark looks thick even through the fabric of his jeans, thick and _straining_ . Fuck. Eggsy needs a cock inside him. He needs it _right now_. Right this second or else—

He tugs at the belt roughly in frustration and makes a pitiful sound of annoyance against Mark’s mouth as the leather catches on the latch not once but twice.

And then Mark—stupid, stupid Mark, if that even is his name—stops him with a good natured huff of laughter and the words, “Slow down,” said oh so gently like maybe he’s starting to think that this is Eggsy’s first time or something else equally as preposterous. “We can take our time, darling.”

_This...is probably an abysmal idea, darling._

Reality snaps back like a taut piece of elastic, and just like that everything that’s been nipping at his heels all evening finally has Eggsy pinned down by the throat. It just takes that one breath between them and a simple word, and suddenly all Eggsy can think about is how Harry Hart was the last person inside of him. The last person to see him come. Now Eggsy is laying on some stranger’s sofa, legs wrapped around their waist, about to let them _take that away from him_.  

“Shit,” he states succinctly, his head falling back against a throw pillow and jaw working. The weight on top of him is abruptly stifling.

Something in the way Eggsy goes lax underneath him must let M-whatever know that it isn’t a curse of pleasure, though, because he puts a bit more space between them and asks, very kindly, “Is...is something the matter?”

“Yeah, uh,” Eggsy starts out clumsily, “could you maybe like...get off me?”

Mark’s compliance is immediately, legs folding under him as he slides back toward the end of the sofa. His eyes never leave Eggsy. They’ve got this blend of confusion and concern mixed within the blue of them that makes Eggsy sort of wish Mark was a piece of shit so that he didn’t feel so guilty for his sudden mood swing.

“I—sorry, mate,” he apologizes once he’s sat up a bit as well. Eggsy rubs the back of his head anxiously before he continues on, “I just don’t think I can—it’s not— _fuck_. This was just a shit idea, honestly.”

They’re both still hard in their jeans but wilting by the second. Or...Eggsy is. He’s trying not to make eye contact with the bulge in the other bloke’s trousers.

It’s awkward. Fuck, it’s _so_ awkward. Mark doesn’t even say anything straight away, so Eggsy gets to his feet in a sudden rush and grabs his discarded shirt where it had been tossed haphazardly to the floor earlier. There’s glitter caught in the fibers.

“Did I...do something I shouldn’t have?” Mark finally questions as Eggsy is pulling the black polo over his head.

“Wot? No! No I—I just…” He tugs his hem into place and buttons his jeans back closed, eyes intentionally avoiding contact. “Fuck. I should just go, yeah?”

“Do you need me to call you a cab?” Mark/Michael offers earnestly. Eggsy lies and says he’ll be alright finding one himself. In truth, though, he just walks the distance. The house is far enough that he would prefer not to foot it but close enough that calling for a ride seems like a waste anyhow.

The sound of JB’s claws clicking on the floor doesn’t greet him when he walks through the front door. If the pug woke to the sound of Eggsy’s key in the lock, he likely didn’t think it worth the effort of getting up.

Yeah. He’s kind of the worst guard dog in the world, actually.

Eggsy doesn’t bother with being quiet. There’s no one to disturb anymore now that Daisy and Michelle have moved into their new flat. And when he says ‘new’, he means _new_. Maybe not literally but good as. Michelle had nearly fainted the first time he’d showed her around.

There’s a loneliness that comes from the solitude they left in their wake but peace as well. And privacy for times like these when he’s still wound as tight as a spring, and there’s a leftover heat in his belly that even the night air couldn’t quell.

Stale sweat, unfamiliar cologne, and just a touch of bile from _who the fuck even knows where_ assault him each time he inhales. A quick rinse would do him some good.

He tests the shower water in the master bath with his wrist, warming it until it’s piping hot. Nearly hot enough to scald but not quite. It’s just enough to turn his skin good and pink while he washes away the remnants of his botched evening.

It’s fucking stupid is what it is. Just that one little word was enough to take him out of it. Enough to skew his perspective so drastically.

“ _This…_ ” Harry had breathed out between heated kisses in front of his liquor cabinet. The same liquor cabinet that still remains untouched in the sitting room downstairs. “Is probably an abysmal idea, _darling_.”

Eggsy’s heart had given a funny little leap at that word. _Darling_.

“Best I think I’ve had actually,” he’d replied hoarsely. Maybe he had been wrong about that; maybe he had been right. Even now he can’t really be sure. Their skin was still warm from the alcohol, but neither were drunk. Just teetering at that lovely level of not-quite-intoxication where everything starts to feel languid and easy.

He remembers standing side by side with Harry in front of the martini ingredients on their second trip downstairs, arms brushing ever so slightly each time Harry moved. With Eggsy’s jacket discarded and Harry’s sleeves rolled to the elbow, the contact was finally skin-to-skin and each touch was like a shock of static electricity up Eggsy’s arm. Like the first time at the cinema with someone he fancied. Breathing heavy and palms sweating, the image of taking their hand playing over and over on a loop in his head. All focus narrowed to that one point of contact, no matter how small. Every touch became something more in moments like those.

Harry’s breath against Eggsy’s neck as he teased him in a low voice.

_Harry’s breath against Eggsy’s neck just before his mouth latched onto that spot where all nerves seem to coalesce._

Harry’s fingers against Eggsy’s wrist to guide him away from the wrong choice of alcohol.

_Harry’s fingers holding Eggsy’s hands together and pressing them into the pillow over his head as Eggsy’s back bowed._

Harry standing behind him, watching over Eggsy’s shoulder.

_Harry standing behind him, bending Eggsy over the arm of the sofa as he buried himself deep inside. Deep enough that Eggsy could practically taste him in his throat._

Eggsy had swallowed thickly at the thought. Harry circled back around to stand beside him once again, and Eggsy’s eyes locked onto the curve of his jaw. That slight looseness in his jowls from age. The dusting of barely there stubble under the shadow of his chin, so out of place next to his otherwise immaculate appearance.

“It’s rude to stare,” Harry stated, face still turned away and eyebrow quirked ever so slightly in amusement. And oh Eggsy made a decision just then. In that exact moment. One that caused his heart race rabbit fast. His breath would have come out in humid little puffs had his jaw not been clenched shut so tightly. Slowly enough for Harry to stop him if he so desired, he leaned in so close to Harry’s side that he could feel the muscles flex beneath his shirt. And then, blood tingling under the thin skin of his lips, Eggsy’s mouth pressed chaste and tentative to the fluttering of Harry’s pulse. Harry had been the one to swallow this time. Eggsy was near enough to hear the clicking of his throat.

“Eggsy...” he’d begun softly—almost regretfully—as he turned his head that way, but whatever words were meant to follow were lost within Eggsy’s urging mouth against his own. Harry didn’t pull away, even to correct the awkwardness of the angle. The kiss was shallow, indecisive, and Harry’s eyes remained open, his brow furrowed like he was thinking. Like he was mulling it over.  

Eggsy had parted from him then, barely, and ducked his head ever so slightly in a way that caused his nose to brush against Harry’s. Whatever questions Harry had been asking himself, whatever variables he had churned over in his head, his decision came in the form of hands on either side of Eggsy’s face and lips moving suddenly against Eggsy’s own once more. Pressing harder this time.

They just kissed for a moment, standing there in the middle of the quiet and the stillness of the sitting room. An open bottle of gin aerated indiscriminately on the liquor cabinet. Moonlight streamed through the windows with arms not long enough to reach them.

“This...is probably an abysmal idea, darling.”

Harry said it when the urgency set in. When their blood began to run hot in their veins. When Harry’s perfect coif had been completely undone by Eggsy’s fingers passing through it. When Harry had groped Eggsy’s arse and pulled him closer so their hips were flush together.

Eggsy had never heard his voice so breathless, not even that time when Eggsy caught up to him on the track after Harry had just woken from nearly being blown to bits.

 _“Avoid getting laid up in the hospital if you can, Eggsy,”_ he’d said with a bit less evenness than he normally would at this stretch of the run. _“You’ll spend the next month and a half feeling like day old dog shit.”_

Eggsy had laughed at the time, partially at Harry’s expense and partially in shock over the crudeness of his rhetoric. He didn’t know why it surprised him anymore. Despite appearances, Harry had every capability of being the most vulgar person in the room when he wanted to be.

But even then, a touch more out of shape than he was used to and over a mile into his run, Harry hadn’t sounded like he did with his body pressed against Eggsy’s.

Eggsy had given his answer—“Best I think I’ve had actually.”—and found himself shoved up against the wall behind him with enough force to make the knick knacks rattle unsteadily on the mantle.

“Apologies,” Harry had murmured against the shell of his ear. Eventually.

“None taken,” Eggsy sighed in reply. A bit nonsensically perhaps but who even gave a fuck when Harry had his mouth on that spot under Eggsy’s ear, when his leg was fitted snugly between willing hips so that Eggsy could ride the sensation Harry’s thigh teasing the underside of his bullocks.

Eggsy can’t remember how they got upstairs. Can’t remember the moment his trousers had been undone or when Harry had lost that blasted tie.

He remembers all those damn buttons though. Remembers panting as he opened up each one, the softness of Harry’s comforter brushing the inside of his knees as they stood at the end of the bed.

He remembers his back pressed into Harry’s mattress for the first time. Remembers moaning something ridiculous about feeling like he was about to get fucked on a cloud.

He’d giggled when Harry brushed too lightly against the insides of his thighs in an effort to coax them further apart, and Harry smirked down at him with a sort of smug sense of knowing.

“Ticklish?”

“Ticklish is for _ankle biters_.”

“You are, though,” Harry had said gently, voice a touch more serious. His thumb dragged across Eggsy’s bottom lip so that he just grazed the inside of it, dipping ever so slightly into his mouth. “You are...so young.”

“Not _that_ young,” Eggsy murmured back defiantly and bobbed forward enough to take Harry’s finger into the wet of his mouth. He sucked down to that first joint, the pad of Harry’s thumb pressed against the bowl of his tongue. Any semblance of tenderness or hesitation was shattered with all the subtlety of a crystal vase being chucked against the wall with brutal and unhesitating force.

Things get sort of hazy from there. Memories are cruel like that, one bright flash flowing into the next while all the dimmer ones fade and fizzle in Eggsy’s mind. He wants to recall it all, even the bits that maybe don’t matter so much. Like how it felt the first time Harry’s cock dragged against his own, skin against skin. Or the way Harry looked when he’d slicked his own fingers to open Eggsy up. Or what words Eggsy had said in his bliss when Harry pressed against that spot inside of him with the tips of his lovely fingers.

But at least he can still imagine the way Harry had looked when he lined his cock up to Eggsy’s entrance, cheeks pink and muscles straining and just the smallest pearl of Eggsy’s precome still clinging to his bottom lip before his tongue had darted out to lick it away. Eggsy remembers reaching up to brush back a lock of hair that had escaped from Harry’s usually impeccable styling and fallen across his forehead. Harry had looked down at him so honestly surprised by the tenderness of the gesture and so fond that it hurt Eggsy’s heart to even look at him. He pressed a kiss to the meat of Eggsy’s palm, held it there as he pushed home in one smooth thrust that made Eggsy keen.

And _that_ Eggsy cannot forget. The feeling of being so filled up by Harry. Over and over as Harry pressed inside. The feeling of being so fucking close to him that he could only be nearer if Harry crawled inside him and made a home in his chest…

Eggsy’s strokes the length of himself as he comes, shower water sluicing across his skin and the smell of Harry’s shampoo still heavy in the air. His heartbeat flutters too fast from the strain of his activities mixed with the humid heat of the shower. It makes his head light and stomach turn. He presses his forehead to the warm tiles on the wall as the remnants of his orgasm wash down the drain. Just like that.

It’s stupid is what it is.

So fucking stupid…

.

 **Today** 12:43 AM

**you**

_U ever just...wanna run away from everythin bbut u know if u did it wouldn’t help shit. It’d just come w u. Like a stink_

♔ **Tilde** ♔

_I have. Lol being in line to be queen of a country certainly isn’t always easy._

♔ **Tilde** ♔

_Are you having one of those moments now?_

**you**

_I had a rly shitty night_

_Thing is its my own fukkin fault_

♔ **Tilde** ♔

_What happened? Are you alright?_

**you**

_Its not bout wat happened rly_

_U member how i said i lost someone that day and it messed me up_

♔ **Tilde** ♔

_I do._

**you**

_Ye_

♔ **Tilde** ♔

You miss them?

**you**

_So much_

_I dunno how to stop_

♔ **Tilde** ♔

_Why do you have to stop?_

_Why can’t you miss them?_

**you**

_I should be better_

_Got more important shit to do and i’m just...missing someone i ain’t gettin back_

♔ **Tilde** ♔

_You can do both, you know? You don’t have to choose._

_Maybe you can live your life and miss them at the same time._

**you**

_Lol u sound like my psychiatrist_

_Sounds better coming from u tho_

♔ **Tilde** ♔

_Well I am happy to talk whenever you need._

**you**

_I like talkin to u_

♔ **Tilde** ♔

_Flatterer._

_I like talking to you too._

.

There are parts of being a Kingsman that are, on occasion, remarkably similar to having an office job. Not that Eggsy would have a lot of experience with that, if he’s being honest with himself, but he recalls his mum taking him into work once or twice in the early years of his life.

Michelle had always liked working, even when Eggsy’s dad was promising a possibility of big pay cheques that would set them up for life. That was before Dean, of course. Before he had eased her out of the position, before he put that pressure on her to quit in order to further her reliance on him.

Eggsy remembers there being that little chart in the kichenette at one of the offices where she had been employed. It showed the exact colour that each person took their tea, a laminated spreadsheet that had been hung on the cabinet door with rectangles in various shades of brown all lined up next to the type of milk and number of sugars as well how long the person would like their tea to be brewed.

Stepping into the Kingsman kitchen is a bit different, though. It feels like walking into an entirely separate world. As if on one side of the door Eggsy is an international super spy working late and on the other he’s an office drone. In this room, he’s the type of person that doesn’t know shite about defusing a bomb or what it might feel like to be shot in the chest through bulletproof fabric. He’s just an average bloke. Making a cuppa to put off research that he ought not be procrastinating on.

The area is much larger than the small room at his mum’s old office. It’s a full, working kitchen, one with enough space for an entire staff to bustle around each other in moderate comfort. Not that the house has seen enough excitement inside its walls for such a thing in decades, but cooks do come in to prep meals once a week. They store the food away in plastic tupperware with labels written in several different hands within a massive, stainless steel fridge and freezer unit.

Things that eat well after a few days being left to keep like pint sized containers filled with enough soup or stew or even gumbo for one. Provençal beef daube. Chicken verde stew. Lamb tagine. There are a couple of slow cooked brisket meals that pop up every now and again, but those usually go before the week even hits Wednesday. The vegan stuff lasts the longest. Alistair seems to be one of exactly three people that frequent the mansion who actually eat it as a first choice.

Just inside the door is a small space of counter with a sink as well as a kettle and coffee machine. There’s a magic bullet for smoothies too as long as everyone takes care to wash it particularly after blending their gross mustard greens, _Hannah_. Here, one of those all too familiar tea charts hangs up on the cabinet as well. Placed for easy reference, he supposes, when one of the handlers is elected to make a cup for everyone at their station that desires it. It’s far nicer than the one at his mum’s office had been. More professional looking for having been put together by a tech wizard working under Kingsman’s rule as opposed to Peggy from HR.

It clearly hasn’t been updated, however. There’s not been much time for it, and Kingsman’s numbers have been fluctuating so often with new members that it would be inefficient to draw a new one up until things settle. Chester’s name is still typed in up there—his cup appearing to be what Eggsy would consider “ideally British”—as well as several that he doesn’t recognise at all.

And, of course, Harry’s.

His little box is a average shade of golden brown. Nothing particularly special about it, but Merlin wasn’t kidding about the sweet tooth. He’s listed as liking a ridiculous five sugars in his cup.

The first time Eggsy had seen it was after a workout in the Kingsman gym. He had run out of water in his bottle and needed to refill the damn thing at the tap. When the list caught his eye, he’d smiled a bit at Harry’s propensity for sweets so blatantly on display before growing rather melancholy and inward for the remainder of the afternoon.  

But now? Now he feels sort of...he feels—

“Hello Eggsy,” Dr. Avidan’s voice greets. She stands beside Eggsy at the counter and places her mug down with a click.

“Doc,” Eggsy begins with an untick of his chin. “How’s it?” He tries to sound relaxed. They’ve only ever talked inside of that little office of hers, and it’s sort of like seeing one of his teachers outside of the parameters that the classroom provided. Especially the way she addresses him so casually when he’s more used to seeing her as...not quite an authority figure but something very close.  

“Average, I suppose,” she replies with a smile. Her accent is as difficult to place as ever, but Eggsy has gotten better at it. Some combination of being surrounded with equal parts British and Scot. The faucet hisses as she turns it on in order to fill the metal pot with enough water for her own cup. “And it’s Harper. Or Avidan. I get that one plenty.”

He presses his teabag to the wall of the mug with the back of his spoon in order to drain it of any remaining liquid and asks, “That advisable? Getting friendly with the patients?”

“In another situation, no. Not even. But, um, in Kingsman?” She leans her hip against the lip of the counter after setting the pot to warm and crosses her arms with a wry sort of smile. “It would get a bit lonely if I didn’t bend that rule, I think.”

Eggsy nods. “True enough,” he adds and nothing more. Avidan presses her lips together, eyes peering down at the dramatic veining of the marble counter as if mulling something over. It’s disarming, to say the least, to see her quite so _uncertain_.

“And how have you been?” she queries finally. Eggsy gives a dubious glance from where he’s stirring in his milk. “As a coworker.”

“As a coworker? Cracking, yeah?” Eggsy tells her with an over exaggerated smile and a wink. “But as someone who ain’t pretending that you don’t know some fucking dirt on my ‘inner psyche’ or whatever....” He trails off, firmly focused on the tea that’s long since mixed. The sound of his spoon clacks against the ceramic as he spins it.

When he looks up, it isn’t at Avidan who is waiting oh so patiently. It’s at that tea chart.  

Harry H. Medium Brew. Five Sugars. Semi Fat Milk.

And Eggsy feels…

 _Fond_. He feels fond. Perhaps a touch sad, as well but he doesn’t  think that it will cling to him. Doesn’t think that he will carry it out of this mansion or bring it home in that cab ride across town. Something else may come. Some other reminder that might bring sorrow in its wake. The hurt isn’t gone. Not by a long shot but it is...

“Better,” he answers finally. “Yeah better, actually.”

“That’s good. That’s very good to hear.” Avidan grins kindly at him, and in that moment he believes that she means it.

“Galahad,” Merlin cuts in, holding the door open with one hand and his eyes fixed on his clipboard. As always. His voice echoes off the kitchen walls. “My office. We’re sending you out. And please stop leaving your glasses where I can't reach you.”

He looks up briefly, just long enough to catch Dr. Avidan standing there as well. “Harper,” he greets with a nod.

“Uncle Liz,” she shoots back, her smirk a touch mischievous.

Merlin’s eyes dart between her and Eggsy at the use of the nickname, and they look glazed with what Eggsy might call fear if it wasn’t so threatening.

“Oh he already knows,” Avidan says. Merlin lifts a discerning eyebrow.

“I would have expected to have been ribbed by now. It can't be said you aren’t full of surprises.”

“Everyone keeps saying that,” Eggsy interjects finally, even as Merlin is already turning to leave with the door swinging on its hinges in his wake. The last half of his statement is more to Avidan than her uncle. “Kinda starting to figure Kingsmen just don’t get out enough.”

“That’s what _I_ keep saying.”

Eggsy throws her a wink in reply, far more genuine this time, and follows Merlin out into the hallway with his mug in hand.

“So what’s on in the big, bad world today, Merlz?” Eggsy asks as he trails after Merlin. The man has such a wide gait that it’s a bit of an effort to keep up with him and drink his tea at the same time.

“For once? Some actual quiet.” Merlin chooses to ignore Eggsy’s new tag—still reeling from his own family so publicly betraying him, Eggsy figures—and taps away at his clipboard cum tablet as they both continue to walk down the familiar, rich halls.

“Maybe people are finally learning to play nice?” Eggsy posits with cautious optimism.

“Hardly. But we’ll take the lull to do some reconnaissance and focus on less immediate needs in our agenda.”

“Don't know if I should call you prepared or paranoid.”

“Funny how often those two coincide.” Merlin has never made a secret of the extra steps he’s taken to keep Kingsman on the ball after the events of V-Day. Anyone might say that it’s how he deals with the guilt of not having noticed the enemy within his own ranks.

Or maybe one mass murder is simply more than enough for him.

They enter Merlin’s office, moving towards his desk while the many screens that tower over it flicker and swap different CCTV images at a rapid but steady pace. There are considerably more than Eggsy remembers.

“What’s all this?” he asks and settles his mug down on Merlin’s desk.

“I’m doing a continuous scan for activity made by companies or partners associated with Valentine just in case any of them survived. Bank accounts, transport, security footage…”

“Merlin, that’s brilliant,” Eggsy tells him with ease.

“Oh. Well,” Merlin replies, voice going somewhat softer. “Thank you Eggsy.”

Eggsy’s gaze is fixed on one of the screens. “So what your eyes pick up then?”  

“There’s a medical research company in which Valentine invested. They seem to be sending several deliveries outside of Scottsbluff.”

“Whose bluff now?”

“Scottsbluff,” Merlin repeats before elaborating. “Nebraska, USA.”

“Want me to check it out?”

“Aye. Strangely, the delivery truck has made several passes through a petrol station in the middle of nowhere, only to make its return journey less than two hours later without sightings on any other CCTV. It’s certainly not at the location where the electronics records say those goods are going. Morgain will give you the coordinates.”

“Jin’s my handler?”

“‘Morgain’ on the comms, please,” Merlin corrects with an exasperated look. “And yes.”

“Aces! He’s a good laugh.”

Eggsy will admit that he used to be apprehensive about welcoming new members into Kingsman, a part of him hating the thought of that change. It felt a bit like losing more of Harry. Jin was cool, though. Cool enough for Eggsy to listen to him. Eggsy knows Merlin considers _that_ to be a fucking miracle with the way Eggsy has taken it upon himself to generally ignore most anything that Merlin or the other handler—codename Nimue—has to say when he’s paired with them.

Merlin grumbles, “When you’re not stressing him out, I’m sure.”

“I like to see it as keeping him on his toes. If he’s gonna be in Kingsman, he’s gotta deal with a lot of toe-thinking.”

“Just keep it simple, Galahad,” Merlin commands as he settles down into his chair. He lifts Eggsy’s mug from his desk by the rim and hands it back to him. “You’re scouting. Nothing more.”

“Yeah, got it.”

“Oh and one more thing.” Merlin puts down his pad decisively and swivels a quarter turn to give Eggsy a discerning look. It takes him a moment to find the right words. “How have you been feeling?”

“Feeling better, Merlin,” Eggsy tells him with a small, grateful smile. For once he actually believes it.

.

 **Today** 1:28 PM

♔ **Tilde** ♔

_I would very much like if we were able to see each other sometime soon._

**you**

_Like...in person?_

♔ **Tilde** ♔

_Lol yes. In person._

♔ **Tilde** ♔

_Only if you want of course._

**you**

_Ye! Ye that sounds aces_

_I’m uh about to head out on the job. Not really sure how long it’ll take but when i get back maybe we can work something out?_

♔ **Tilde** ♔

_I would like that._

.

“So wait, him coming back as a zombie is canon?” Jin queries in his flat, American accent. SoCal, Eggsy’s pretty sure. He’s getting better at picking that sort of thing out.

“Sort of? It’s like how you get to play as his son at the end of the first one, innit? But you’re Zombie John Marston.” Eggsy hits the signalling switch and turns his car down the road toward the petrol station. The scenery around him as he drives steadily becomes more populated—though still excessively sparse—compared to the vastness of the empty road behind him.

“Zombie cowboy?” Jin contemplates into Eggsy’s earpiece, far away in his comfy office chair in London. Not that Eggsy is annoyed or anything, but after several hours driving his arse is furiously numb. “Sounds awesome. My wife has the game, so I’ll give it a play on my next day off.”

“Which is ‘never’ because this is Kingsman,” Eggsy grouses good naturedly. “I’m approaching the town. Still think the name’s fucking weird.”

“Copy that. At least we pronounce all the letters in them,” Jin quips back.  

“Never understand why Americans have such trouble with shite like Leicester and Worcestershire when you don’t even say ‘herbs’ right.”

The words quiet Jin, but Eggsy is starting to work him out well enough to know that the silence is less one of defeat and more Jin biting his tongue. Too polite to overstep the invisible boundary between them. Plus, he’d probably rather not be on the same side of Eggsy as Merlin and Nimue. Not that Eggsy would become less cooperative over something so petty, but the trepidation must still be there.

The town in question is quiet, discreet, and structured with the usual main street in the heart of it while the veins and arteries stretch out into bumblefuck nowhere landscape. Amidst the humble buildings lies the station that Eggsy happens to be here to locate.

“It should be your second left down 21st street,” Jin directs him. “The place is called the Western Travel Terminal.”

“I see it,” Eggsy says as the dull ketchup and mustard colours of the location comes into view. The abbreviation ‘WTT’ is displayed prominent on several places on the establishment and over the pumps. “How long’s the window for the arrival time?”

There are a couple of rapid clicks over the comm as Eggsy pulls up to the station.

“Two hours.”

“Maybe I should get some snacks while I wait, yeah?”

A short while later, the truck groans its way alongside one of several pumps and hisses to a stop under the muted colours of the canopy. The driver steps out with heavy footing. At first glance, he doesn’t look like much more than the average stereotype of a man who spends his life on a sporadic diet and seated for many hours of the day. Eggsy has long since stopped judging people at first glance, though, the same way a child learns to stop putting their hand on the stove.

Eggsy is already sliding out of his car and cautiously making his way towards the truck by the time the driver has pushed the door to the shop open with a jingle. If Eggsy recalls the layout correctly (he does), the location is a good size on the inside with toilets at the far end. Assuming that will be part of the stop, of course. Either way, plenty of time for Eggsy to accomplish his goal. Once near the tail end of the lorry, Eggsy opens his jacket to pull out a thin wallet. He intentionally fumbles to tug it free so that it falls to the gritty cement below. When he stands back up from retrieving it, he braces his right hand against the back of the cargo hold in order to discreetly transfer the tiny tracker to a remote part of the bumper. He casually cuts a path past the truck as though unaware of its presence and carries on toward the shop like his mission is nothing more than to obtain a box of chocolate covered raisins.

The driver strides out with a bag full of brightly coloured snacks and climbs into the cabin of his truck. After filling up on petrol and doing a touch of maintenance under the bonnet, he pulls back onto the highway. With Eggsy on his tail this time. Eggsy has to keep enough distance as to not stick out like a sore thumb in the vast Nebraska countryside. It’s too far to easily keep track of the truck on the long road ahead. That’s where the tracker kicks in.

Of course Merlin will make good use of the continued readings later. For the moment, though, this is what they need.

“Huh?” Eggsy utters and looks back up from the monitor in the car’s panel to keep his eyes on the road. “He stopped. Piss break already?”

Jin hums. “No there’s nothing in the area for miles except…”

“Except...wot?”

“An old barn?”

His brow furrows a bit at this piece of information. It doesn’t sound like the sort of place they’re looking for but...maybe... “You see any other roads on that satellite?”

“Just that dirt one, it looks like. Maybe one other. I don’t know if your car can take it.”

“Don’t let the mechanic hear you say that.” Eggsy huffs a laugh at the memory of the American contact with black hair, all grey at the roots, who had looked at him through narrowed eyes as she pressed a callous, wrinkled finger to the center of his chest when handing him the keys to the James Bond looking number that he’s seated in now. “She’s well fucking scary.”

“If she came after me, do you think I could take her?”

“Not a chance. You gotta trust the craftsmanship, mate.” He knocks a couple times against the dashboard for emphasis. Gently. “Don’t matter though. Can’t risk running into him on the way out. Any place I can lie low till he shuffles along?”

There isn’t, in fact, anywhere acceptable for a Kingsman agent in bespoke suit and luxury sports car to peruse for an unspecified amount of time without catching unwanted attention. A flaw in the gentleman spy routine if he ever did hear one. He ends up finding a nice copse of trees where he’d bet his life young teens from the farm town all those miles behind him like to park once it gets dark.

Jin has an eye on the tracker and does his utmost to keep Eggsy company. There’s a lot more waiting than Harry told Eggsy about when he’d pitched him this gig. Waiting for missions, waiting for new information, waiting for the next move. It had all been much more hectic after V-Day had hit. Eggsy grew used to the constant rush of it.

Things have slowed considerably since then, and Merlin expects them to peeter off even more in the coming months, especially once they’ve weeded out as much of Valentine’s side operations as is feasibly possible.

In the end, though, it doesn’t take as long as other stake outs they’ve sent him on. Alistair told him about a time he’d had to lay out on some rooftop in the pouring rain for twelve hours straight, staring down the sights of a sniper rifle, before the shoot was called off entirely.

It isn’t anything as bad as all that. Just an hour before Jin tells him, with a mouth full of whatever food the other techs had brought him and the sound of its wrapper crinkling loudly over the comm, that the trucker is on the move again. Another half hour and he’s far enough away for Eggsy to pull off onto the main road without any risk of being spotted.

He turns with purpose onto the little dirt road that greets him a few miles up the long stretch. Dust kicks up in clouds around his tires, bits of rock clacking occasionally against the underbelly of the car.

“I see cameras,” Eggsy states ten minutes in when he spots a wire fence crawling towards him in the distance. “And a security gate.”

“I can loop the feed but you’ll have to get the gate yourself,” Jin tells him with fingers already clacking against his keys.

“Done.”

The air outside of Eggsy’s car is close and so hot that he feels the skin between his shoulder blades begin to prickle with sweat almost immediately. He looks up at spiralled barbed wire laid along top of the crosshatched pattern of the fence, electrified wires running through the center of the winding spikes. It’s new or at least very well taken care of. The metal gleams in the sunlight, rust free and unbent from the elements.

“Somebody doesn’t want visitors,” Jin states astutely.

Eggsy hums in agreement. “What’s the security on the feed like?”

“Not as good as they thought it was,” Jin tells him as Eggsy turns his attention to the security pad. “Whoever cobbled it together was...intelligent but novice.”

Eggsy pulls out a little lock picking kit from where it is discreetly tucked into an inside pocket of his jacket. “Thought Valentine was some sorta computer genius,” he points out, examining the lock that keeps the front plate of the number pad in place. “How’s a branch of his got such shite security?”

“His little...pet projects or whatever the hell you want to call them are scattered and isolated without him. Maybe this one didn’t get divvied up a computer wiz.”

“Lucky for us,” Eggsy replies under his breath. He pops the metal plate away from the protruding number buttons and fishes out a few wires with a crease in his brow. The heavy machinery groans as it slides the gate open along its runners. “And we’re in.”

“Woah,” Jin says, clearly impressed. “You’re good at that. Didn’t even trip any failsafes.”

He answers, “Ye of so fucking little faith,” and abstains from pointing out that it wasn’t exactly his first go around with a thing like that. Doesn’t tell him that there had been a few posh spots that Dean asked him to hit when he was younger. Doesn’t mention that one time that he used this particular skill set to break him and his mates into someone’s fucking summer home for a bit of a rager.

He turns back to the sweet little sports car that’s winking in the sun—the one that would have made him buzz in excitement just to sitting in it’s fine leather seats when he lived in the Estates—and climbs back inside.

For as quick work as he made of it, the keypad that’s now clicked shut and discretely wiped of prints was on the tough side. Took a quick mind and nimble fingers. He doesn’t even know what would have happened if he’d fucked it up but he doubts it’s anything good. Just makes him all the more proud to beat the fucking thing. _Harry_ would be proud. He always liked when Eggsy reminded people that it wasn’t just brute force and a good aim that made him Kingsman material. Always liked—

“There,” Jin speaks up after several minutes of silent progress on the road forward. “That’s the barn. There’s nowhere to hide the car so you’ll have to park out here and hope for the best.”  

Eggsy eyes the place warily as he pulls off into a patch of tall grass beneath a half dead willow. The branches of the tree are draped with vines of yellowing and spotted leaves that hang down like a thin, moth eaten curtain. It isn’t a perfect place for cover but it will do well enough.

The barn itself looks to have been red at some point in its life, though it can hardly be labeled as such now. Most of the flaking paint clings weakly to the wood, but it holds out well enough in certain splotches for the intended color to be easily discernible even from afar. A few bales of hay lay scattered around the area, and a large silo is tucked close to the back corner of the structure.

“Don’t look like much,” Eggsy says as he slides out of the car all smooth and easy, cicadas screaming in the open air. He parts the curtain of leaves with his arm and steps through.

The closer Eggsy gets as he approaches the more he thinks that someone, somewhere _must_ be taking the piss. The building is barely standing, and even from a distance he can tell that sections of the roof have long since collapsed.

What the hell interest could they possibly have in such a dump? The place looks like it hasn’t been touched in years. Maybe it’s just a drop point, he reasons with himself, though that makes the security gate a bit of a mystery. Then again, the only drop points he’s ever seen are the ones used by Dean’s low level drug ring when Eggsy wanted to keep his stepfather off his back for a couple of days.

He doesn’t have to draw too terribly close to the barn before his glasses pick up movement. With trained swiftness, he darts behind a stack of long forgotten hay bales—the rolls collapsing in on themselves as the fodder has begun to decompose—with his gun at the ready.

A solitary figure walks out of the barn and idly saunters just around the corner, whistling a nondescript tune that Eggsy can’t seem to place. Eggsy tracks the movement carefully before realising the man—who, upon closer inspection, he notes to be a security guard if the gun and cap are anything to go by—is just having a bit of a pee break. The infrared imaging in Eggsy’s glasses doesn’t read anyone else in the immediate area. What the hell is he guarding? Eggsy’s glasses don’t detect any security cameras, and a quick glance at the most prime locations confirms the fact. He supposes that makes some sense, of course. Who in their right mind would think to look here?

He waits until the guard is done shaking off and makes to return to his post before following him at a distance. Eggsy stops just outside the crumbling entrance to the barn and watches the man return to a reclining position inside a tiny cubicle at the other end of the barn. It’s only big enough for one, the walls strikingly new and lines clean compared to the weathered barn around it. He’s left the door open but otherwise the small room is entirely closed in on itself. A window unit hums a low, idling note as it pumps the space full of air. The man has clearly long since stopped giving a fuck about this job, so his guard is low enough to make a quick job of him with a well placed amnesia dart.

“Aaaand we’ve officially crossed the reconnaissance line,” Jin murmurs passive aggressively as Eggsy searches through the guard’s pockets for anything of note.

“Already here, ain’t I? Might as well.” Eggsy finds a key hanging from a Nebraska Husker’s lanyard around the guard’s neck. At least Eggsy thinks it’s a key. It’s unlike any that he’s ever seen before, but the shape is the same. In place of teeth, the cuts are bumps and circles along the width of it. He holds it in his field of vision longer than he usually might so Jin can get a good look. “I wonder what this opens then?”

Jin makes a thoughtful noise and tells him, “That looks like it goes to a Mul-T-Lock.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that it opens one hell of a security door.”

“ _Secret_ security door? Brilliant. I’ll start looking for bloody...swinging bookcases or—” Eggsy starts but catches his own, grumbling tone as he happens a glance an area of the ground beneath his feet. With his infrared still on in the corner of his glasses he sees, regardless of his disbelief, thermal signatures moving beneath his feet. Faintly, mind. Likely due to there being a thick layer of what Eggsy can only guess is metal that blocks a proper read.

“Either Hell just _happens_ to be in Bumblefuck Nowhere, USA or I’ve just found an underground lair.” Eggsy gets no response to his quip. Odds are Jin is as much at a loss for words as he is; they’re both a bit wet behind the ears, so sue them. Eggsy can’t be quite sure why the whole thing makes him giddy. He blames it on all those spy films he’s consumed over the years, now more than ever if he’s being honest.

Intricate shafts and tubing of what Eggsy can only guess are ventilation and plumbing intertwine beneath the wood shavings that lightly dust the shine of his expensive shoes. They obscure his vision in a geometric web.

“Key’s gotta lock. Lock’s gotta door,” he muses. “So...where is the fuck is it?”

The silo. As derelict and rusted as everything in this forgotten farm but to Eggsy it suddenly seems like a beacon of possibility.

“If I had an underground lair that constantly needed supplies delivered, where do you think I could hide a lift big enough in plain sight?” he asks, entirely rhetorical. He grins a bit to himself as he moves toward the cylindrical structure. It’s not long before he finds himself at the rotting, outer wall, looking at a rather high tech looking keyhole. Neat, pristine, and new amidst the shades of rusted brown and peeling white paint.

“Galahad.”  Jin’s voice is stern. Eggsy hates it when he gets like this, because it means he’s being ‘serious’. “No. Wait for backup. You’re supposed to be scouting. We don’t know what’s down there.”

Eggsy looks up the height of the silo in consideration. “How soon can you get ‘em here?”

“Fifteen minutes. Tops.”

He mulls it over as his eyes focus on the keyhole, eagerness to throw caution to the wind clawing at his his thoughts. Who knows what could happen in fifteen minutes. Who knows what could happen with choppers surrounding the area and effectively blowing their cover.

“Call for it,” Eggsy commands finally, but Jin barely manages to give a sigh of relief before Eggsy slips the key into the lock. Instantly, the doors to open to reveal a giant, silver, diamond-tread platform circling the centre.

“Galahad!”

“I’m just scouting on ahead! We’re here, ain’t we?” Eggsy would be lying if he said he wasn’t being a cheeky, little shit as he presses the button activating the lift.

As the platform sinks, the single figure of another member of security becomes clearer in the infrared that’s idling in the corner of Eggsy’s glasses. The closer he gets, he notices a queer tilt to the silhouette’s head. Likely curious as to why the lift has been activated in the first place. No other shipment is probably expected today, and they’d have gotten no warning from the unconscious team member above. Eggsy slides seamlessly along the curve of the wall to the left side of the door, fingers prepped along the smooth edge of his watch. When the doors open, he can just see the muzzle of the guard’s gun pointing into the empty space. The figure slowly walks inward to inspect further, and Eggsy dispenses an amnesia dart to the back of his neck. It knocks him out just as swiftly as it did his fellow guardsman, and Eggsy drags the limp body out of sight within the elevator.

No one else is in within the wide room, walls built far enough apart to accommodate shipments as well as the people who would come round the corner to collect goods for distribution. At the moment there are stacks of cardboard boxes—likely from the truck that Eggsy had tailed—against the left wall. He slits open the tape on one with a knife from the inside pocket of his suit jacket.

Eggsy’s brow furrows down at the medical supplies that stare back up at him. Medical vials of narcotics, sure, but also things like electrodes and those gel packs for defibrillators. Not exactly what he expected.

He files the information away for later, sure that Jin is taking quiet note.

Eggsy creeps deeper into the room, hugging the wall as he approaches the turn of it so he can peer around the corner undetected.  

The hallway before him is practically glowing with the neon lights that bounce off of clinically white walls and shimmering, black tiles. Doors run along the walls with researches—or what Eggsy believes to be researchers, judging from the distinctive white coats and I.D. badges—walking in and out of them. Eggsy darts back to the knocked out guard and nabs his hat and vest before proceeding to walk down the stark, white hall as if he belongs there.

He reaches the first door, a large, heavy thing with a small window that he peeks through discretely. Within, he sees three researchers looming over someone lying supine on a metal slab and connected by a plethora of tubing and wires. Eggsy doesn’t get a long enough look before one of the doctors meets his eye. He looks away, but it’s too late. The lab coat comes marching out of the room before Eggsy has much of a chance to get down the hall.

“You there! What are you doing away from your post?”

“Sorry, I was um…looking for the bathroom,” Eggsy tries, caught out. He hides his voice with a somewhat forced and gruff American accent that would make Jin wince if he wasn’t too busy trying to cover Eggsy’s ass.

Lab Coat observes him with a suspicious look and replies, “You’re not the regular security guard. Where’s Ryan?”

“Ryan? Off sick. Terrible diarrhoea.” Inwardly, he shakes his head vigorously against the lie that slips from his tongue. Knows it isn’t selling the second the researcher’s gaze flicks down toward his shiny Oxfords. Not his best moment.

“Alert security!” Lab Coat calls out to his partner before Eggsy is able to dispose of him. It’s far too late. By the time he gets to the other scientist, the alarm has already been triggered. Soon enough the hall is flooded with guards out of fucking nowhere. Eggsy fires back at the first round of shots with deadly accuracy, but it’s too many of them bottlenecking the hall. He dives through the door left open by the researches and shuts it with a heavy slam.

“Jin, mate, I could _really_ use that backup right about now,” he pants against the door.

One researcher still remains in the room, standing on the opposite side of it and aiming a Beretta in Eggsy’s general direction. An ambitious choice for someone who looks less than wholly confident with a weapon in their hand. Eggsy fires a quick shot into the man’s head before one can come flying in his direction instead and doesn’t even watch as the body crumples to the floor in a heap.  

There’s a large, metal latch along the frame of the door that isn’t connected to an exterior lock. With a heavy clank, Eggsy bolts it closed behind him. He’s sure they have a way to get through it, but maybe by the time they haul out that welding kit, the backup that Jin is sending over will be enough cover to hold him. He doesn’t doubt his own abilities. Not in the fucking least these days. There isn’t the benefit of every security officer in the building being implanted with a chip that can blow their head off of their shoulders if Eggsy’s handler is only clever enough, though—at least not that he knows of—and he’s only one bloke.

He can hear them scrambling around outside. Shouting orders amongst themselves, and he knows that it won’t be long now. He can’t get comfortable here.

“That cover was kind of shit, man,” Jin tells him in that accent of his, more pronounced than ever. Keys clack rapidly in the background.

“Come off it,” Eggsy replies as he takes in his surroundings. “I had to think on my feet.”

Jin’s voice is laced with amusement. “I was told you were _good_ at thinking on your feet.”

“Oh, fuck off.”

The white walls around him look even more strangely sterile from inside of this room. Hospitals are meant to be sanitary, but there’s always an element of them that looks lived in. They may not be entirely comfortable, but there is a sense that they are made to be inhabited. This, though. This is...not created for the man at the center of it all. It’s chilly and rigid. A place of study and perpetuation, not healing.

The patient—if he can even be called as such—is laid out on an uncomfortable looking metal slab, not unlike the ones that Eggsy has seen in morgues on daytime television. The only exception to that comparison would be the mechanisms and hinges in certain areas that look to be created to maneuver the body around to the researcher’s whim. He isn’t even covered. Just clothed in a simple, white hospital gown made for ease of access. Eggsy circles the body, still aware of the sounds echoing from the other side of the door.

“Poor sod. Wonder if his family even knows where he—” but his contemplative, pitying words are cut off when his eyes finally rest on the face of the man on that table. For a moment, his body freezes. His eyes go wide as what he’s looking at settles into realization like a rock sinking down into the bed of a lake.  

There’s a heaviness in his chest, and he thinks that Jin might be saying something but it’s hard to hear over the roaring in his ears.

It’s Harry. It’s fucking Harry. It can’t be Harry but it is.

“—lahad! Galahad, respond!” Jin finally breaks through and just like that the world around Eggsy snaps into place. His hands are shaking. “Your heart rate is all over the place! What the _hell_ is going on!”

“Get Merlin,” Eggsy orders coldly.

“What the fuck do you mean ‘get Merlin’? What’s _wrong_?”

Eggsy’s response comes out as frigid and sharp as Jin has likely ever heard, words cutting in their seriousness. “Fuck off and get Merlin _now_!”

He can hear Jin murmur another expletive, and the line goes still.

There’s a banging on the door that brings Eggsy back to his most immediate of problems followed by the sound of heavy machinery and a burst of sparks.

“Fuck,” Eggsy spits as his eyes dart around the room. There’s a ventilation shaft above him, wide enough that it would be a tight fit but that he could squeeze through if he tried. Except—his gaze snaps back to Harry’s still form, tubes coming out of so many places that he’s afraid what removing any one of them might do.

 _Fuck_.

“Harry…” The name escapes Eggsy’s lips plaintively. Stupidly hopeful that he can reach him. It hasn’t entirely sunk in that this is Harry Hart, alive, before him. Breathing. Entirely and utterly _not dead_.

Eggsy is, at the very least, well acquainted with the sight of Harry lying prone in a hospital bed.

“Harry, wake up. Please?” Eggsy’s eyes burn with brimming tears, his chin quivering. “Harry, open your eyes.”

He dares not touch any of the tubes or wires attached to Harry like macabre puppet strings.

“Harry, you gotta wake up,” he pleads pathetically, fists clasping against Harry’s hospital gown just over his chest. Beneath his hands, he can feel how much thinner Harry has grown in the past months, but deep inside his body that steady heartbeat still thuds.

“Galahad, what the fuck is going o—”

“You see him too, right?” Eggsy interrupts the sudden appearance of Merlin’s voice. He can hear his own voice shaking no matter how hard he’s trying to remain in control. “Tell me I ain’t fucking losing it.”

“Yes…yes Eggsy I see him.” Merlin’s own voice doesn't seem to be faring much better.

“What’s going on?” Jin asks—clearly confused—through the stunned silence.

Merlin disregards the query. “Morgain, where are the FBI?”

“ETA two minutes.”

“Don’t got two minutes, bruv,” Eggsy tells them when he notices how close the sentry are to cutting through the locks. As quickly as he can manage, Eggsy removes the button up that he’d the nicked from the security guard. His Kingsman jacket is still stuffed, uncomfortable and hot, underneath. He pulls it off as well and spreads it out as much as possible over Harry’s body before checking the ammo of his gun.

“Galahad, use the vent!” Jin calls out, realising Eggsy has no intention of moving. “You have a chance to get out of there!”

“Not without Harry.”

Eggsy slams the clip back into place and climbs the shelves that are to the left of the entrance in preparation. The metal door crashes open just as he’s scrambling to the top, two guards storming through. The first doesn’t get far before a kick to the back of the head knocks them out cold. By the time Eggsy’s foot is pressing the man’s throat to the floor, he’s already spinning to kick the second across the room.

“Why aren’t they shooting?” Jin inquires over the comms, but no one answers as Eggsy knocks a fourth guard down with the butt of a Glock 22 that he took from the third after breaking his arm. He gets through five, seven, thirteen more before the ranks seem to thin into nothing. The sound of shouting from the direction of the lift tells him that whatever was left of them have been sufficiently diverted. He turns his attention back to Harry to find a single straggler looming above the unconscious man’s form. Amidst the fray, she’d managed to bypass Eggsy and now rips carelessly at the wires and drips. Even from a distance Eggsy can see the way the needles tear at Harry’s skin, leaving little beads of blood in their wake.

Eggsy aims his gun.

“Drop them. Now.” There’s a coldness to his voice. It freezes all noise from the other end of the comms as well as the woman next to Harry. “Step away from him, and I won't have to shoot you.” Still, she doesn’t move. “The cavalry’s here, mate. Come quiet, and this shit won't be near as painful for you.”

There’s a moment between them where Eggsy knows that this will only go one way. It always does. He expects little else. She reaches for her gun faster than Eggsy can anticipate, pointing the barrel at Harry’s head.

Eggsy is far quicker. With fear for Harry’s life bolting through him like lightning, his finger pulls the trigger before the gunman even has time to properly line up her shot. Blood splatters across Harry and against the far wall behind him as Eggsy’s bullet cuts through flesh and brain matter.

“Harry!” Eggsy rushes to him and inspects every puncture, cut, and tear that his connectors left behind. Other than that, Harry is in one piece. (And alive, _fucking_ alive.) He lies there, though. Still as death but for the gentle movement of his chest. A ball of desperation grows thick and heavy in Eggsy’s chest. “Goddammit, come on!”

The heart monitor has been screaming a long and steady note ever since it was disconnected from Harry’s pulse. Maybe Eggsy could carry him, he reasons. Get him in a fireman’s lift and take him the rest of the way. He’s strong enough. He chews on the inside of his lip as he glances at the door, the sound of scuffling and squeaky trainers running across linoleum emanating from the hall. Harry’s legs, though. Eggsy can manage it but those damn things are sure to be a pain in his arse.

The thoughts catch at the cadence of Harry’s breathing. The gentle rhythm comes out a touch heavier than before, and when Eggsy looks at his face, he sees warm, chocolate brown peering up at him.

God his eyes. He’d fucking missed his eyes.

“Oh god,” Eggsy sobs. “Oh Harry—oh fuck— _fuck_ —"

“Eg…gsy.”

He tenses at the sound of that voice. He’d often told himself in moments of grief that one day he’d forget what it sounded like, but he’s proven wrong once again. Harry is here. Reminding him.

“E…liza…where…’s Eliza?”

“Who?”

 _Eliza?_ he thinks. _Who the fuck is Eliza?_ He mulls over all of the people he has met through Kingsman and those who might have fallen on V-day beyond Harry’s knowledge. Eggsy goes through a spectrum of emotions, and none of them are good. One, a surprising little spark of white hot jealousy. He’s over it just as quickly, mind focusing on the task at hand.

“Galahad you need to calm down,” Jin tells him, perhaps a bit belated due to not having a larger grasp on the situation. Eggsy knows by now that Jin doesn’t respond well to being kept in the dark. “You’re not being rational about this.”

“Like hell I need to calm down!”

Eggsy takes a moment to rummage through cabinets and drawers, pocketing every little bottle and test tube that he can find. Even pulls down the drips. He wants to know what the fuck they’ve been doing to Harry in this damn laboratory. He wants answers. Merlin will tell him later what a good idea that was, he's sure of it.

“Come on Harry,” Eggsy whispers while helping Harry to his feet. “Come on. Up. We gotta get the _fuck_ outa here.” Harry’s state becomes apparent when he struggles to put  
pressure on his knees. How long was he hooked up for?

“Eggsy, stay put. We don’t know what his condition is.”

“Can’t really worry about that shite right now, Merlin,” Eggsy says as Harry leans into side heavily, his eyes struggling in the effort to remain open. “Just get us the fuck outta here, yeah?”

“Backup is on the lift. They’ll meet you where you are if you only wait a moment.”

“Don’t fucking move!” another faceless foot soldier interjects, blocking their path. How fucking guarded is this place?

“Not soon enough,” Eggsy tells Merlin. Reflexes still intact, he turns to protect Harry, but he needn't have bothered. His attacker slumps and falls, and in the place where he once stood is now occupied by a fully outfitted member of the FBI. The agent lets the gun fall to their side and signals Eggsy to move. They’ll have him covered while their team clears the rest of the area. Eggsy doesn’t need to be told fucking twice.

On the lift, he remains quiet. His vision remains squarely on the side of Harry’s sleep soft face. It’s then that he really notices his scar. Hidden under a mess of hair before and half beneath the bandage covering his eye, it cuts starkly across Harry’s temple. A souvenir from Kentucky, no doubt.

“Who is he?” Jin’s voice asks quietly.

“The previous Galahad,” Merlin explains “We thought—”

“We _saw_ him die, Merlin,” Eggsy hisses, turning away from Harry to make sure he doesn’t startle him with the biting words.

“We saw him get _shot_ ,” Merlin says. Pedantic twat.

Eggsy scoffs. “Yeah in the fucking head!”

“Well,” the replies comes, musing and strained all at once, “if anyone could work a miracle, it would be Harry, wouldn’t it?”

Eggsy’s got nothing to retort. No barbed or witty comeback. He’s looking directly at his proof, no matter how batshit unreal this all feels.

The moment the doors are open they’re met with the roaring sound of helicopter blades, blowing hot air and loose hay all around them. They’re rushed up onto the aircraft, and it’s not long before they pull up. The medical team on board—a massive man with corded muscle across the width of his shoulders and a women with red hair tied in a loose bun; they likely think Eggsy an Interpol agent in a bit of a spot—rush to move Harry’s weight onto a small gurney.

It’s then that Eggsy allows himself to breathe, to relax the fighting tension inside him. At least most of it. Harry has become conscious enough to stay awake and look around. His eyes focus on Eggsy and weakly reaches out to him until he’s cupping his cheek in his hand.

Harry mumbles something with a look that’s so terribly despondent. It’s lost in the thundering of the rotary wings above them.

**Author's Note:**

> Come talk to us at [hellahartwin](http://hellahartwin.tumblr.com) & [galahadthelate](http://galahadthelate.tumblr.com).
> 
> Comments are incredibly appreciated! Thx for reading!


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